Peter W. Flint reviewed Seeing Trees by Nancy Ross Hugo
Great premise, fails to deliver
2 stars
The overall premise is enticing. The author’s stated intent is to invite the reader to engage with the detailed phenology of plants using trees and shrubs commonly found in the cultivated landscape. In reality this amounts to high quality photographs of buds, flowers, and bark, fluffed up with personal anecdotes and old-white-people landscape history. The bulk of useful information is contained in the introduction, which abstracts plant parts and lifecycle into digestible chunks and facilitates a more detailed understanding of the life of the plant. However, what one assumes to be more detailed descriptions of the idiosyncrasies of individual plants turn out to be personal commentary about life in the South, of which the relevance of the featured tree is unclear. I do recommend going to the bookstore and flipping through the pages to see the photos, but as a perennial reference for beginners in horticulture or naturalism, this book …
The overall premise is enticing. The author’s stated intent is to invite the reader to engage with the detailed phenology of plants using trees and shrubs commonly found in the cultivated landscape. In reality this amounts to high quality photographs of buds, flowers, and bark, fluffed up with personal anecdotes and old-white-people landscape history. The bulk of useful information is contained in the introduction, which abstracts plant parts and lifecycle into digestible chunks and facilitates a more detailed understanding of the life of the plant. However, what one assumes to be more detailed descriptions of the idiosyncrasies of individual plants turn out to be personal commentary about life in the South, of which the relevance of the featured tree is unclear. I do recommend going to the bookstore and flipping through the pages to see the photos, but as a perennial reference for beginners in horticulture or naturalism, this book is pretty useless.