Book Review: The Tree Collectors – Tales of Arboreal Obsession

Fall/Winter 2024 

The Tree Collectors by Amy Stewart is a collection of 50 short anecdotes about how people discover their passion for trees and what they do with that interest. This relatable collection includes people from all over the world while occasionally branching off into useful resources and guides. 

The tales are organized by the storytellers’ backgrounds: healers, ecologists, artists, curators, educators, community builders, enthusiasts, seekers, preservationists, and visionaries. This list alone is intriguing, but what really caught my eye were the pieces included after a few of these stories, such as tree collections you can visit, tips for collecting leaves, bonsai classifications, and non-human tree collectors. These extra inclusions extend a hand, calling the reader into this tree-lined universe. 

Each biographical piece is a seedling of a larger idea. I had to start with the landscape architect’s story, but if you get your hands on a copy, don’t miss reading about the astronaut. Not every life is spent in horticulture; in here are artists and poets, YouTubers and filmmakers, an economist growing trees in memory of a lost child and a botanist trying to collect pine cones from every species of pine tree.