Book review: Remarkable Trees of the World by Thomas Pakenham

Genre: Non-fiction

Thomas Pakenham went around the world looking for remarkable trees and when he found them he took photographs of them. If you like trees ( like I do ) then the premise of the book is extremely interesting. Thomas does not try to find record holders (like largest tress or tallest tree), though he may have visited some of them. Rather he is looking for interesting trees, trees with character. Each chapter of the book focuses on one aspect, like gaints, dwarfs, Methuselah (old trees) and so on, with Thomas finding interesting examples of these.

Thomas textual description of the trees and the environment he encounters them is good, poetic sometimes even. The photographs in the book are lovely. I really wish that there were many more photographs in the book though. This kind of a book demands a large number of high resolution photographs. Perhaps If this book was written more recently and Thomas used a modern high resolution digital cameras we would get many more gorgeous photos. Thomas likely lugged around a old school film camera and so had to be careful with what he shot.

So any cons of this book are really a function of when it was written and nothing more.

Rating: 3 / 5, Good, wish it had many more photos though.