Study of the Strange and Wonderful Lives of Trees
Harriet Rix, The Genius of Trees: How They Mastered the Elements and Shaped the World (London: The Bodley Head: Penguin Random House, June 5, 2025). Hardcover: $30: 320pp. ISBN: 978-1-847927-82-8.
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“A mind-expanding exploration of how trees learned to shape our world by manipulating the elements, plants, animals, and even humankind, possessing agency beyond anything we might have imagined… For a supposedly stationary life-form, trees have demonstrated an astonishing mastery over the environment around them… Tree scientist Harriet Rix reveals the inventive ways trees sculpt their environment and explains the science of how they achieve these incredible feats.” In the second half of the book, Rix explains that trees have been evolving towards “creativity, producing more and more inventive molecules”, while humans have been evolving towards “avarice” by “taking” these “inventive molecules for our own use” from trees. Trees have been shaping “humans chemically” for “over the last 500,000 years by providing the many compounds we can’t make for ourselves.” These compounds include “medicines, supplements, antioxidants, vitamins and spices”. This is informative, but then the author digresses to describe a trip he took to a garden. He eats a fruit. The description is relatively detailed and specific. It is interesting that some trees in that city had been planted 400 years earlier by Jesuit missionaries, but what is the relevance? The narrative is disjointed and disorganized.
“…Through deep history and unseen biochemistry across the globe, Rix restores trees to their rightful station, not as victims of our negligence but as ingenious, stunningly inventive agents in a grand ecological narrative. Trees manipulate fundamental elements, plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and even humankind to achieve their ends, as seen with oaks in Devon, England, shaping ecosystems through root networks and fungi, and in Amedi, Iraq, changing sexes as they age; laurel rainforests in the Canary Islands regulating water cycles; and metasequoias in California influencing microclimates.” These are indeed interesting details. Those who read through this book should be entertained while learning about these rarely-discussed achievements of trees. “Some tree species have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure their fruits reach large primates, who can spread their seeds over vast distances, while poisoning smaller and less useful mammals. Others can split solid rock and create fertile ground in barren landscapes, effectively building entire ecosystems from scratch… Research has shown that trees have an even greater role in preventing global warming than we thought—trees, at one time thought to produce methane actually consume it.”
This is one of the most pleasant cover-designs in this set. The rainbow colors, and simple lines are appealing to viewers.
Overall, this is a pretty good book. I did not find many faults in glancing through it. It is well-cited, and descriptively-written. The intended audience is mostly the public. Though researchers entering this field would also benefit from this overview.
--Pennsylvania Literary Journal: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-summer-2025/