Nature:Thomas Pakenham is a tree connoisseur in the way that other people are wine connoisseurs. He knows the best, the rarest, the oldest and the most interesting of trees, and he is able to convey his connoisseurship to us through his breathtaking photographs and his accessible, often whimsical, text.
Pakenham insists on the importance of photographing trees in their natural habitat. To do this, he has flown thousands of miles, has driven in rough vehicles for weeks, has trekked for days, has plunged through streams, climbed slippery hillsides and balanced on the edge of precipices. Sometimes, the fieldwork was done in the intense heat of a desert or a desolate plain, at others in a rain-soaked forest or on stony mountains. The environment in which a tree is found living is as important in Pakenham's photographs as the tree itself. That is why his pictures tell us so much more than a purely botanical illustration or a photo taken in a botanic garden.
The text is leavened with anecdote and commentary that makes the descriptions of the trees more approachable for the general reader. The chapter headings read like the list of contents for a thriller: "A World Turned Upside Down", "Last of the Yellowwoods", "Where Elephants Rule", "Suicides and Stranglers", "Under a Cloud". Thus, the general reader is engaged in a way that a conventional tree book, with its unfamiliar botanical language, can never do.
AS THE TITLE of the book suggests, the author is not so much interested in ordinary trees as in remarkable ones. Many of the illustrated trees are remarkable for their sheer size and beauty. Caught by the camera in the oblique light of dawn or of sunset, the tracery of their branches, the brilliance of their foliage and the patterns of their bark are startlingly revealed. Other illustrated trees are remarkable for their age - unlike the majority of us, trees often become more beautiful as they get older. But the book is also a cabinet of arboreal curiosities. They stretch our concept of what a tree is. Some of the trees shown are of a bizarre shape; strange, spiky creatures such as the menacing octopus tree, the surreal grass tree, which looks like a huge, elongated column of grass, or the welwitschia, which looks like nothing on earth and which takes about 1,000 years in which to grow two metres. The author has a special affection for the baobab tree that is called the "upside-down tree" because its branches look, for all the world, like roots.
The fragile existence of many of the featured trees is alluded to. Although some are protected by government agency, a sense of urgency is required if one wants to see certain others before their extinction in their native habitat. Logging, over-grazing, drought and fires, both natural and man-made, are just some of the hazards. For example, the book contains a fine photograph of pine trees exploding like fireworks in a forest fire started by a careless tourist. Unrestrained tourism and the robbery of exceptional tree specimens as garden trophies are further hazards. An unexpected danger is the result of a well-intentioned conservation programme. In 1995, a ban on the culling of wild elephants was introduced in one of the areas under consideration. This has resulted in a dramatic increase in their population. Elephants can be destructive creatures. When they are hungry, they will upend and smash trees so as to graze more easily on the foliage. Elephant damage to some forests has been nothing short of a local environmental disaster. In the book, a picture of a living sesame tree is contrasted to great effect with a picture of one uprooted by an elephant. The dilemma for the conservationist is: is it right to cull the elephants in a controlled, sensible, and humane manner in order to save the trees? Or should nature be allowed to take its course?
The necessity of a holistic approach to conservation is hinted at in many parts of the book. Trees don't exist in isolation. They are part of an ecosystem and, indeed, form a mini ecosystem in themselves. For example, old trees provide habitat for many other plants such as mosses, lichens and fungi. They act as hosts for climbing plants or vines. They are home to a whole miniature world of insects. They are haunted sometimes by butterflies. They provide nesting sites for birds and homes for lizards, snakes, monkeys and baboons. One of Pakenham's photographs shows a crab emerging from the roots of a giant fig tree. Another shows a meerkat devouring a scorpion by an old baobab tree. Pakenham's text is also peppered with references to the bird and animal life that is hosted by old trees. Phrases like the following abound: "The tree was full of boisterous summer life: grey lizards, blue rollers, pied crows"; and "When the rain stopped, the orange paperbark and corkwood quivered with elegant birds: a pair of barn owls, yellow hornbills, pied crows, a nightjar".
LESS SERIOUSLY, HE describes old trees that have been adapted as human habitat. For example, the hollow interior of some old baobab trunks have been adapted variously as a prison, a post office, a pub and a refuge for local tribesmen escaping from a colonial army. You can still buy a pint at a bar inside one old baobab. Another old specimen is venerated as a shrine. The author recalls one old fig tree that was so big there was room for 17 African huts in its branches.
Anyone who has Thomas Pakenham's three previous tree books, Meetings with Remarkable Trees, Remarkable Trees of the Worldand The Remarkable Baobab, will want this one, as it contains what are undoubtedly his best photographs to date. They repay lengthy study. Sadly, he writes that this may be his final volume on the world's remarkable individual trees. But are not the world's forests and woods, trees in the collective rather than as individuals, still awaiting his remarkable lens and pen?
Patrick Bowe is the author or co-author of nine books on gardens. His latest book, Gardens of the Roman World, is about the gardens of ancient Rome
In Search of Remarkable Trees: On Safari in Southern Africa By Thomas Pakenham Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 208pp. £25