An Excerpt from The Tree Collectors

The Japanese practice of forest bathing, shinrin-yoku, changes the levels of stress and pleasure hormones in the body, decreasing cortisol and increasing serotonin.  And if being around one tree feels good, imagine how a hundred trees would feel. In her first botanical nonfiction in more than a decade, Amy Stewart brings us captivating stories of people who spend their lives collecting trees and asks them: what drives one to collect something as enormous, majestic, and deeply-rooted as a tree? 

In her gentle, intimate, slyly humorous way, Stewart brings fifty of these people to life, organizing their stories into categories. There are the community builders--like Shyam Sunder Paliwal who, after the death of his daughter, began a movement in his Rajasthan village to plant 111 trees whenever a girl was born--who do the remarkable work of knitting people together under an arboreal canopy. There are seekers who have taken their passion for trees around the world, or even into space. There are visionaries--the former poet laureate, W.S. Merwin, who planted a tree a day for over three decades, until he had turned a barren estate into a palm sanctuary. And there are healers--like Joe Hamilton, who plants trees on land passed down to him by his formerly enslaved great-grandfather--who have found a way to heal their own lives, the lives of others, or even wounds of the past, by planting trees. 

Vivid watercolor portraits of these extraordinary people, populate this lively compendium along with with sidetrips to investigate more about trees, including: famous tree collections, necessary terms, and even "tips for unauthorized forestry." This book will be a gift for the hundreds of thousands of readers who have come to Amy's previous nature books and a delightful, informative, and often poignant treat for a whole new audience.

The excpert comes from a section of the book on ecologists, and begins on page 39.

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Shubhendu Sharma studied his entire life to be an engineer. Then, just six months into the job he’d always wanted, at a Toyota plant in Bangalore, he met a botanist who would change the course of his life. 

But even before they met, he’d started to feel that something was wrong with the career path he’d chosen. “I went into supply development. Our role was to understand the entire process of how a tire is made, or a small part like a nut or a bolt. We would go to the suppliers, and then to their suppliers, until we got to the source of the raw materials. And I started seeing that almost everything starts from a natural resource, and it all ends up in a junkyard. There is nowhere else for it to go but the junkyard.” 

An engineer thinks in terms of systems and can chart the logical outcome of a sequence of steps. What he realized, when he considered every step in the process of making a car, was deeply unsettling to him. “Is it for the good of humanity that we’re making ten million cars every year? Or is it because we want to keep our jobs, keep our machinery running? Because one day, maybe it’ll be the hundredth generation, there won’t be anything left to convert from a natural resource to end up in a junkyard.” 

That’s when he met the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who had been hired by Toyota to plant one of his tiny forests at the factory’s campus in Bangalore. “My boss said that somebody from Japan had come to give a lecture on the environment,” Sharma recalled. “He was not in a good mood that day, so he said sarcastically, ‘So who is going to go and attend it?’ My job was very hectic, and I wanted a break, so I said I would go.” 

Miyawaki had been invited to explain his method of planting a dense, rapidly growing, self-sustaining forest on any small plot of unused land. An area the size of a few parking spaces would work, although a typical tiny forest is about the size of a tennis court. His ideas stood in sharp contrast to the industrial production cycle Sharma was starting to question. 

“If you plant a forest today and help it to grow for the first two or three years, and then go away and come back after twenty years, you’ll see that place flourishing with life,” Sharma said. “That cannot happen with any other industry. Why? Because when you’re working with a forest, you’re working with nature. In any other industry, we’re continuously working against nature. You want to save something from corrosion? You’re always sanding it, putting primer on it, maintaining it. Why? Because corrosion is a natural phenomenon. You have to fight it.” 

Sharma volunteered to help Miyawaki plant the forest at the Toyota campus. The method had been rigorously tested and systematized. It involved densely planting local native species in a plot of land that had been intensely cultivated and inoculated with soil microbes. Nothing more was required, beyond heavy mulch and a little supplemental water for the first few years. The roots would form a massive web, the trees would grow rapidly, and within a few years, the forest would be practically impenetrable, making it the ideal host for insects, birds, and other wildlife. 

Once Sharma saw the method in action, he tried it at home, installing a tiny forest in his backyard. “This was so much more joyous than doing anything else. I could not get this idea out of my mind, that this was something I should be doing for the rest of my life.” 

In 2010—just three years after that fateful meeting with Miyawaki— he quit his job. Today he installs tiny forests around the world and teaches people how to do so in their own backyards. As a result of his work, at least 4.5 million trees have been planted in forty-four cities across North and Central America, Europe, the Middle East, and India. 

Sharma emphasizes that planting a Miyawaki forest is no substitute for conserving ancient, wild forests. What he does is not reforestation but afforestation, a process of planting a forest on land that is currently treeless. These pockets of forest, whether they’re installed on corporate campuses, in city parks, in unused areas around freeways or airports, or behind someone’s house, can still behave like natural forests by supporting wildlife, sequestering carbon, and controlling erosion. 

They’re also beautiful, especially in a backyard. Even a tiny forest evolves as the shrubs and smaller trees give way and the larger canopy trees mature. Leaves fall and build a new layer of mulch. Small fruits and nuts attract wildlife. Birds build nests, and caterpillars give way to butterflies. It’s an ever-changing natural panorama. “I think having a forest at your own house is probably the greatest luxury anyone can have,” he said. 

The Miyawaki method, systematized by Shubhendu Sharma: 

1. Survey local forests for native species. Look for shrub, subtree, tree, and canopy tree species.
2. Procure seedlings from local nurseries or seeds from local forests.
3. Dig soil at least three feet deep and incorporate locally sourced materials to add nutrition, perforation, and water retention (examples: manure, rice husk, and coconut fiber).
4. Inoculate soil with microorganisms purchased from a garden center or cultured on-site.
5. Plant densely: about one plant every two square feet.
6. Cover with a thick mulch layer.
7. No management is the best management. Water and weed for the first few years as needed.

Excerpted from The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession with permission of the publisher, Random House.
Copyright © 2024 by Amy Stewart.
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