The bitter truth about why goats climb trees
NATURE AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 TREES by Jonathan Drori (Laurence King £17.99)
The first time Jonathan Drori saw his father cry was when a spectacular old Cedar of Lebanon near their home was struck by lightning.
Watching its dead trunk and limbs being sawn up, the young Drori ‘thought about the huge, heavy, beautiful thing that was hundreds of years old and that I had thought invincible, and wasn’t, and my father, who I had always thought would be in benign control of everything, and wasn’t’.
After a long career at the BBC — during which he produced more than 50 science documentaries — Drori has returned to the subject of trees, and our relationships with them, to produce one of the most quietly beautiful books of the year.
It takes the reader on a fascinating tour of our planet’s arboreal wonders, from the argans of Morocco — up which nimble goats climb to nibble through the fruit’s acridly bitter peel and reach the astringent pulp inside — to the Szechuan pepper of northern China.
This small tree’s tiny red fruits contain chemicals that trick the nerves in our lips and tongue into sensing vibrations ‘like licking a ninevolt battery’. The sensation is so well understood by the Chinese that they describe it with a single syllable: ‘la’.
each tree gets a page or two of text and an eye- quenching illustration by the French artist Lucille Clerc.
her thoughtful drawings combine architectural precision with a delight in structural patterns on every scale. She sets horse chestnut leaves spinning like pinwheels, turns suburban leylandii into a witty game of aerial Tetris and compares the cone shape of a Norway spruce to the violins made from its wood.
I had often wondered why the violins and cellos of the 17th and 18th century were considered so special.
Drori explains that the luthiers of the period, Antonio Stradivari and the Guarneri family, used Norway spruce grown during a ‘ little ice age’ that began around the 15th century, causing slow growth, exceptionally narrow annual rings and, therefore, very stiff and consistent tonewood. Modern scientists are attempting to recreate this slow growth by inoculating newly sawn spruce with a special fungus, to eat away the non-structural part of the cells and make the wood lighter without losing rigidity.
This is only one of the many ingenious uses we’ve found to suit the unique properties of specific trees.
Other chapters offer fresh takes. Balsa, for instance, was glued to birch in the fuselage of Mosquito warplanes after Britain ran short of aluminium during World War II. In the plantations of ecuador, its ice cream- cone blooms open at night to offer nectar to the capuchin monkeys, which transfer pollen on their furry limbs. Not all tree pollinators get such a fair deal. Next time you dip your spoon into a fig, pity the poor wasp that pollinated it. Drori explains how Blastophaga wasps of both genders hatch inside the dry, inedible fruit of the male tree: the ‘caprifig’. There, they mate. The male then burrows his way out and dies. At this point, the male flowers inside the caprifig produce pollen, which coats the female wasp on her way out. She then flies off in search of another tree. If she finds another male tree, she will tunnel her way into its caprifig, lay her eggs and continue the cycle. But if she enters a female fig, she will discover she has been conned. She will pollinate the tree as she searches in vain for the structures to fit her anatomy. She cannot lay her eggs. And, as the seeds of the tree develop, the female wasp will be digested by the plant’s enzymes. The Buddhist monks of an obscure ascetic sect in northern Japan chose an equally gruesome fate for themselves when they ingested the sap of the Chinese lacquer tree in their strange determination to become sokushinbutsu or ‘Living Buddhas’. This agonising journey to enlightenment/mummification — which was made illegal in the 19th century — took years of slow starvation and dehydration, ending with the consumption of sap-steeped tea as they died. The toxic chemicals in these tall, straight mountain trees helped the corpses resist decomposition and repelled maggots. ANy
readers who still buy screwtop wine will be reminded that choosing cork preserves the delicate ecosystem of the Mediterranean montado and that the chemical which caused bottles to taste ‘corked’ in the eighties and Nineties has been largely eradicated.
Although Drori’s book contains many tales of environmental destruction, it also offers hope.
As global warming prompts the search for species that will survive the rising temperatures of central europe, scientists are looking to the Cedar of Lebanon, a symbol of eternity in the Middle east.
When that London cedar fell in Drori’s childhood, his mother told him there’d been ‘a world in that tree’. Now, the future of our world may rest in the ancient species’ broad and perfumed boughs.