Amy Stewart was fully prepared to geek out, as plant nerds are known to do, when she began researching her latest book: “The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession.”
But as she dove into the minds and motivations of people who collect trees like other people collect coins or baseball cards, she picked up an unexpected thread to the story.
“I thought I was going to write a book about tree geeks and we’d geek out about the particular trees they would be interested in. That would be the book,” said Stewart. “But what I was surprised to find is that people had these other, really profound reasons for collecting trees.”
For many, it was not just a compulsion to score a new acquisition. The trees hold a much deeper meaning.
Take Vivian Keh, a Korean American, whose Korean family elders went through starvation and other hardships during the Korean War.
Keh grows 50 persimmon trees on her quarter-acre plot in San Jose.
Persimmons, in Buddhist culture, are a symbol of transformation but for her kin they also are a special sweet treat and were a great delicacy during difficult times.
She sends boxes of the fruit to her elderly relatives as a gesture of love.
“She says this is a way for her to stay connected with them. Sometimes it’s hard between the generations to really keep any kind of connection. I thought that was profound and beautiful,” Stewart said.
She also profiles a man in India who planted a tree to commemorate his daughter who died. Then he had the idea to get everyone in his village to plant a tree whenever a girl is born.
“He turned it into a project that really reminds everyone of the value of girls in a culture where girls are undervalued,” said Stewart, “and now there is this forest and all these trees have been planted to honor these girls, and for the girls to honor the trees.”
She also interviews Joe Hamilton, who cultivates pines for harvest on the last of the land passed down through his once-enslaved great-grandfather in South Carolina, creating an income source for the next generation of Hamiltons.
During Stewart’s long talks with collectors from all over the world, many of them open up in very personal ways.
There was one woman who desperately wanted children but was unable to conceive.
“She was carrying all this pain around with her. She wanted to be a mother and she couldn’t and the trees filled a hole in her life,” according to Stewart. “She wanted to introduce a new variety of maple and one of the reasons is she would be able to name it. She said, ‘I haven’t been able to name a child. So I would like to be able to name a tree.’ That is so beautiful and profound.”
The idea for the book took root about 10 years ago when she met a man at a book event who identified himself as a tree collector.
“I thought, well that is a weird thing to collect,” she recalled. “Trees are really big and they’re hard to move. How does that even work?”
Stewart, a former resident of Humboldt County who now lives in Portland and whose parents are in Santa Rosa, is attracted to quirky garden adjacent subjects which she turns into bestsellers.
Her 2009 book, “Wicked Plants,” was adapted into a national traveling exhibit that, as she puts it, “terrified children at science museums nationwide for over a decade.”
Her book, “The Drunken Botanist,” took on the plants that make for the best mixed drinks and also inspired a few bar names around the world.
And “Wicked Bugs” explores the cruel superpowers of destructive insects, from millipedes that stop traffic, to “bookworms” that devour libraries.
Stewart, who also is an artist, circled back to the idea of exploring tree collectors in a book several years ago when she sold a painting of some palm trees to a man in Boise, Idaho. As she was packing the painting for shipping, she included a note saying where the trees were located in San Diego.
“He wrote me back and said, ‘We know right where that is. My husband collects palm trees but we live in Boise. They can’t survive the winter in Boise so we have to wrap them up in the wintertime in foil blankets and Christmas tree lights to keep them alive and it looks like an amateur sci-fi movie in our backyard.’ And I thought, OK, that is crazy. I have to do this book. And people started coming out of the woodwork.”
This particular couple is part of “the zone deniers,” who defiantly push the limits of their climate to grow what they love.
Stewart also writes about a man in New Jersey who is trying to grow the state tree for all 50 states, which can be a stretch in the cold mid-Atlantic state.
