Healing Trees

The Healing Tree celebrates the forest: its powers, spirits, magic, medicine, and mysteries. Author Stephanie Rose Bird shares how trees have provided her with personal healing, then allows us to share in that process for our own benefit and, by extension, provide healing for Earth's beleaguered forests.

"Our adopted angel"—that's what Danielle's adoptive parents called her. She grew up adored, doted on, and unconditionally loved. It wasn't until she was in college that she first felt a gnawing curiosity about her roots. From time to time, she would wonder: Where did this face come from? Where did this body come from? Where did this blood come from? Her search to find her biological parents had begun-one full of surprises and revelations.

Percival Everett's The Trees is a must-listen that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

Canadian botanist, biochemist and visionary Diana Beresford-Kroeger's startling insights into the hidden life of trees have already sparked a quiet revolution in how we understand our relationship to forests. Now, in a captivating account of how her life led her to these illuminating and crucial...

There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. There is no warning. No chance to prepare. They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed.

A deft blend of science reporting and travel writing, The Journeys of Trees explores the evolving movements of forests by focusing on five trees: giant sequoia, ash, black spruce, Florida torreya, and Monterey pine.