ELDERFLORA

An ingenious examination of old trees, mixing history, politics, and science.

Trees are simply big plants, but humans have long revered them, and bigger, older trees have been objects of worship. Farmer, a history professor and author of Trees in Paradise and On Zion’s Mount, adds that we often revere old trees better than old people. “Caring for elderflora does not track with eldercare,” he writes. “Because gnarled trees possess personhood without bodily mortality, and because they have oldness without elderliness, they elicit wonder and esteem, unlike hunched bodies of old people, objects of pity and contempt.” The author defines an “old” tree as one that has lived more than 1,000 years. Almost all are evergreen gymnosperms (“flowerless plants with naked seeds”) as opposed to angiosperms (“flowering plants with fruits”). Farmer’s examples—cedar, olive, ginkgo, fig, baobab—have enormous capacity to recover from catastrophic damage. “At the organismal level,” writes the author, “they do not senesce, meaning they don’t lose vitality with age. In theory, such a plant is internally capable of immortality.” Death comes via an external force: wind, flood, disease, and, increasingly, humans. By the 18th-century, most Western cultures no longer worshiped trees but grew fascinated by those of great age and historical symbolism. Farmer devotes much of the narrative to the scientists who study them and the ongoing efforts of naturalists and Indigenous people to reconcile industrial capitalism with forest preservation. Nature lovers will relish the author’s stories, if not his conclusion. Tree cover is expanding across the planet but mostly through monoculture plantations of young, commercially useful trees. Humans continue to cut down old-growth forests. Farmer notes that we wonder what it was like for our ancestors to live among mastodons and other giant animals. Our descendants may wonder how it felt to experience “mammoth and millennial trees.”

Fascinating accounts of the greatest plants that ever lived.