Lives of the Trees

One of my earliest childhood memories is of the Helderberg Workshop, a summer camp I attended in rural Voorheesville, New York, when I was about 5 years old. My recollections are mostly fuzzy images of musty tepees and damp woodlands, but I also learned some vital life lessons: "Three Blind Mice" is the best song to play on the recorder, boys with a fondness for spearing millipedes with sticks are to be avoided, and birch bark makes for excellent drawing paper.

These memories returned while I was reading a delightful four-page chapter on the birch tree in Diana Wells's Lives of the Trees. It is just one of many dozens in the book, all of about the same length and organized alphabetically, each exploring the history of man's relationship with a different tree.

Birch trees immediately come across as far more useful than any of the trees starting with the letter A, as well as the early Bs. Their nuts are edible, their sap can be made into beer, and their bark is good not only for writing and drawing (Jefferson once suggested that field notes were better taken on weatherproof birch bark than on paper) but also for making clothing, canoes, and huts. In the event of a nuclear winter, birch would be a handy tree to have around.

Wells invites this sort of mental meandering, as she advances neither a single story line nor a focused argument. Instead, she leads the reader on an amiable tour of individual trees and their contributions to human civilization: spices, quinine, tea, coffee. Wells's review of coffee's history offers surprising details, including a note that the French novelist Honoré de Balzac is said to have drunk 60 cups a night. Only then, he claimed, would his ideas come "marching into his mind 'like battalions.'"

Another compelling chapter, on the cinchona tree, includes an unexpected primer on the origin of the gin and tonic. The key ingredient in tonic water is quinine, the first antimalaria drug, which is derived from cinchona bark. The curative powers of the bark were known to Europeans by the middle of the seventeenth century, after a Spanish countess was given it in powdered form while suffering from malaria during a trip to South America, where the tree is native.

After 1820, when two French scientists isolated quinine from the bark, the natural remedy began to change the course of history. Seeds were clandestinely ferried out of Bolivia and sold to the Dutch, who established a cinchona monopoly in Java, thereby cementing their dominance in the trade of various valuable tree products, including cinnamon from Sri Lanka and cloves from the Spice Islands. But the Brits best used it to their advantage. "Once quinine was available and relatively cheap," Wells writes, "Europeans could live in places that had previously been 'the white man's grave.' They could also dose their workers and exploit places that had been inaccessible....Who knows how history would have differed without quinine, dutifully drunk each evening in tonic (mixed with gin) as the sun set around the world."

Not all chapters of Lives of the Trees are created equal. Wells's history is more encyclopedic than narrative, and her prose is more languid than lyrical, which makes some chapters a bit of a slog -- namely, those that focus too heavily on the derivation of a particular tree's name. In the end, what makes the book special isn't of Wells's making at all. The true delight comes not from the party trivia you'll amass but from the memories, etched in the mind's own birch bark, that a small detail will bring suddenly back into view -- another reminder of how trees shape who we are without our really thinking about it.