Books about trees: seven worth reading, from forest science to a field guide

The best books about trees for most readers come down to three. If you are new to the subject, start with The Hidden Life of Trees (Amazon (book)), a forester's short and gentle tour of how a wood lives. If you want the science from someone who did a good deal of it, read Finding the Mother Tree (Amazon (book)). If you would rather feel it than study it, try The Overstory (Amazon (book)), a novel in which the trees matter as much as the people.

The other four fill in what those three leave out: a biologist who listens to a dozen trees around the world, a geobiologist's memoir of life in the laboratory, a reporter's adventure in the crowns of the tallest redwoods, and a field guide for anyone who simply wants to put a name to the tree at the end of the road.

My usual subject is climate policy, where trees turn up as numbers: hectares pledged, tonnes stored, offsets sold. These books are a useful corrective. They treat a forest as a living system with its own history and its own timescales, which is worth remembering the next time a company promises to plant its way to net zero.

How we chose

We picked these seven for their clarity for a general reader, for a spread of viewpoints running from laboratory science to memoir and fiction, and for how widely each is read and reviewed. Book links go to Amazon.

Start here: how a forest works

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Wohlleben worked for years as a forester in Germany before he began to see his beeches less as timber and more as neighbours. In short chapters he describes trees that send chemical warnings through the air, pass sugars to struggling kin through their roots, and grow slowly, to their long-term benefit, in the shade of their parents. It came out in German in 2015 and in English the following year, and it introduced a great many people to the idea that a forest is more than a stand of separate trunks. The prose is warm and openly anthropomorphic, which is both its charm and the main complaint against it: several forest scientists have argued that it presents contested findings as settled. Treat it as a door into the subject rather than the last word.

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. Simard grew up in a logging family in the interior of British Columbia and went into forestry herself, where she began to doubt the standard practice of clearing birch and other "competitors" from young conifer plantations. Her experiments, including a much-cited study published in 1997, suggested that carbon could pass between birch and Douglas fir through the fungal networks that link their roots. The memoir tells that story alongside her family life and the resistance her findings met in an industry built on clear-cutting. It suits readers who want to know how the science was done, not only what it found. It is fair to add that the "mother tree" idea is now disputed: in 2023 a group of fungal ecologists published a review arguing that popular accounts, and some scientific ones, had overstated what field studies show about trees sharing resources underground.

The Songs of Trees (Amazon (book)) by David George Haskell. Haskell, a biologist at the University of the South in Tennessee, chose a dozen trees in very different places, among them a ceibo in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a balsam fir in the boreal forest of Ontario, a pear on a Manhattan street and an olive in Jerusalem, and went back to each one to watch and listen, often with a microphone. His argument is that no tree is really an individual: each is a knot in a web of fungi, insects, birds, people and weather. It is the most literary of the science books here, and the most philosophical. Readers who like a strong plot may find it slow, while those who enjoyed his earlier The Forest Unseen, a year spent watching one square metre of Tennessee woodland, will feel at home.

All three books keep returning to the ground beneath the trees. Much of a forest's carbon sits below the surface, in roots, fungi and the organic matter they leave behind, and the difficulty of measuring it there is one reason claims about storing carbon in soils deserve the scrutiny set out in our piece on what soil carbon science can promise.

Lives in the lab and the canopy

Lab Girl (Amazon (book)) by Hope Jahren. Jahren grew up in rural Minnesota, where her father taught science at a community college and she spent evenings in his laboratory, and she became a geobiologist whose research reads the history of plants in their chemistry. The book alternates short, lyrical chapters on how seeds, roots and leaves work with longer ones about building and rebuilding laboratories on tight budgets, usually alongside her loyal and eccentric colleague, Bill. She also writes candidly about her bipolar disorder and about being a woman in science. It covers plants in general rather than trees alone, but trees run all through it, and it suits anyone who has wondered what a working scientist's life actually involves. Climate-minded readers can follow it with her shorter The Story of More.

The Wild Trees (Amazon (book)) by Richard Preston. Preston, best known for The Hot Zone, follows a small group of botanists and amateur explorers, chief among them the botanist Steve Sillett, who climb the coast redwoods of northern California and hunt for the tallest of them. What they find in the crowns, far above the forest floor, is a world of ferns, shrubs and deep mats of soil that almost nobody had studied. It reads like an adventure story, with real danger and a love story, and it is the easiest book on this list to give to someone who claims not to read about nature. The science is lighter than in Simard or Haskell, and the book is nearly two decades old, so it describes canopy research as it stood in the 2000s.

A novel and a field guide

The Overstory by Richard Powers. Nine characters, each bound to a particular tree by family history or accident, slowly converge on the fight over old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest. One of them, a botanist mocked for claiming that trees signal to one another, will seem familiar to anyone who has just read Simard. The novel is arranged like a tree, in sections called Roots, Trunk, Crown and Seeds, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019. It is long and openly polemical, so readers who dislike fiction with a message may find it heavy going. It also takes on a question the non-fiction mostly avoids: what an ordinary person should do once they care.

The Sibley Guide to Trees (Amazon (book)) by David Allen Sibley. Sibley is best known for his bird guides, and he brings the same method here: detailed paintings rather than photographs, showing the leaves, twigs, bark, flowers and fruit of each species side by side, with range maps. It covers North America, so it is the right pick for readers in the United States and Canada; readers in Britain and the rest of Europe will want a regional guide such as the Collins Tree Guide instead. It is a large book, better kept in the car or on the kitchen table than in a coat pocket. For anyone who has finished the other six and wants to know whether the tree outside is a red maple or a sugar maple, this is where the reading turns into looking.

Which book about trees should you read?

One pairing works especially well. Read Wohlleben and then Simard, and you meet the same ideas twice, first as wonder and then as evidence, which leaves you better placed to judge how far the evidence goes. If the trees lead you on to the climate itself, my list of climate change books picks up from there, and all seven titles here also sit on our bookshelf.

Questions readers ask

What is the best book about trees for beginners?

The Hidden Life of Trees. It is short, needs no background in science and is written in plain, warm language. Follow it with Finding the Mother Tree if you want to see how the research behind such claims was done, and where it is disputed.

Is The Hidden Life of Trees scientifically accurate?

Partly. The broad picture, that trees respond to their surroundings and interact through roots, fungi and chemical signals, rests on real research. Some of the stronger claims, and the language of friendship and parenthood, go further than many forest scientists think the evidence allows. Read it as an enthusiastic introduction and check the details elsewhere.

Is The Overstory based on a true story?

No. The characters and their stories are invented. The novel does draw on real history, the protests against old-growth logging in the American West, and on real research into how trees interact, so much of its background will be recognisable from the non-fiction on this list.

What is a good tree identification book?

For North America, The Sibley Guide to Trees. In Britain and Europe, look for a regional guide such as the Collins Tree Guide. Whichever you choose, a guide to your own region will serve you far better than a general book about trees of the world.