People collect all kinds of things – stamps, coins, books. But trees? The title of Amy Stewart’s delightful new book, “The Tree Collectors,” uses the term “collector” loosely. Some of the 50 “collectors” she highlights do accrue and cultivate trees, but what makes them qualify for the designation is their passion for the plant and their efforts to conserve it.

Perhaps the best known tree collector is poet W.S. Merwin who, from the 1970s to his death in 2019, created a whole forest of palms from seeds he and his wife gathered from around the world. Today, the W.S. Merwin Palm Collection is one of the largest in the world, with nearly 3,000 individual palm trees over 18 acres in Hawaii.

Review

Random House

“The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession”

Written and illustrated by Amy Stewart

Random House

$32

Among the other fascinating collectors Stewart highlights is Joe Hamilton. He grew up in Green Pond, S.C., on land that his father had inherited from a formerly enslaved ancestor – what’s known as heirs’ property, a form of ownership in which families hold property collectively, without clear title. Hamilton was able to secure proper ownership of 44.4 acres and decided to pay it forward, by planting loblolly, a fast-growing pine. Stewart points out that this collection of a single kind of tree, planted multiple times, is unusual but has a clear purpose: “to create generational wealth and continuity.”

Then there’s Max Bourke. Forty years ago, he and 16 friends bought 60 acres of land in Canberra, Australia, with a single Monterey pine and a few stumps. Bourke, a plant scientist, joined with 16 friends to restore the land to its formerly forested state. They started collecting seed from native trees along the coast, and over the last 40 years have planted over 100,000 trees, many of them the endemic spotted gum. “Visitors ask us how we managed to buy a forest on the coast, and we tell them that we didn’t,” Bourke said. “We bought a dairy farm on the coast, and we planted a forest.”

Sairus Patel, who worked for years developing fonts for Adobe, became fascinated by the more than 40,000 wildly diverse trees on the campus of Stanford. (He was not the first to do so, as he learned when a friend gave him a copy of “Trees of Stanford and Environs,” by Stanford astronomer and engineer Ron Bracewell.) Patel is now the third overseer of the Trees of Stanford project, which tracks the more than 400 species of trees on Stanford’s campus. He explains how, in his earlier career, he would open books upside down and try to identify typefaces. Now he attends to vein and petiole rather than serif and finial, reading an older language. “There is definitely, for me, a bridge between fonts and tree identification.”

In 2015, documentary filmmaker Salomé Jashi ran across a photo of an entire uprooted tree crossing the Black Sea on a barge and, fascinated and appalled, soon learned that the Georgian billionaire (and former prime minister) Bidzina Ivanishvili was buying entire rare and beautiful old trees from his poor rural comrades – environmental impact be damned. The next day Jashi set to work on what evolved into “Taming the Garden,” a lyrical 2021 documentary which, without a narrator, simply serves as witness to these bizarre sales and the uprooted trees’ journeys. Jashi explores the role of consumerism and colonialism. Jashi says that when she first saw the tree on a barge, “I had this feeling that my axis had shifted. And for me, a tree became a kind of symbol of belonging, of being rooted somewhere, of stability, of standing – standing on something, or standing for something.”

Gradually, Stewart assembles her ensemble cast into a story about the value of trees in our imagination as much as in our ecology and economy. Although Stewart notes many practical aspects of the projects undertaken by her platoon of arboreal zealots, her own writing and painting for “The Tree Collectors” is itself an homage to the tree. The author of such books as “The Drunken Botanist,” “Wicked Plants” and the Kopp Sisters mystery series, Stewart delights in beauty and connection, in history and prehistory – and in all the many ways that our fellow living beings bring pleasure and meaning into our lives.

The book’s structure – brief biographies accompanied by Stewart’s lovely illustrations – invites browsing rather than following a trail through the forest. I happily wandered from one of Stewart’s charming and vivid stories to another, much like I meander from tree to tree in the woods. If you are already interested in trees, this is a charming, browsable book that’s filled with the color and surprise of an actual forest. If you are not, it may well lure you into our leafy ranks.

Michael Sims, author of “The Story of Charlotte’s Web” and “The Adventures of Henry Thoreau,” is writing a book about the young Charles Darwin in London.