Suggested Books For Bonsai Enthusiasts: Part 2

A second selection of tree-ish books you might enjoy.

None of these books are about bonsai, but like the list in Part I, they may illuminate why bonsai captivate us.

The first two books I’ve read and think are marvelous, and the last one has been recommended to me many times, including by readers of the blog.

The Man Who Planted Trees— A tree fantasy by novelist Jean Giono. A young man travels through a barren land in France in search of restoration, and meets a shepherd who has been planting acorns. No one asked him to do this, but he plants in the hills anyway. Decades later the man returns and finds a landscape he doesn’t recognize. The shepherd has been busy. Giono had been commissioned to write a story about a remarkable person, but when the publisher received it, they complained that the shepherd was fictional. Giono replied that they hadn’t requested a real person, so he gave the story away. It’s short, and it’s a gem.

A Sand County Almanac— This tree-adjacent book is a classic. It tells of Aldo Leopold, a Forest Service and game management pioneer who buys a cheap, degraded farm in Wisconsin in the 1930’s and records the life he finds there. This is like Walden a hundred years later but without the sarcasm or trying to outfox loons in a canoe, rather, raising questions about our responsibility to the wild inhabitants of the lands we interface with: the now famous “land ethic”. Stunning, timeless, and quietly challenging.

The Golden Spruce— A suggested book I’ve not yet read. The story is of a tree venerated by the Haida tribe—a spruce with a mutation which makes it yellow—which is felled by an outsider, who, in a night of madness, kills the thing he loves the most. The subtitle, A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, lends some anticipation to its multiple storylines. It’s historical non-fiction. A mystery. With insanity. About trees. What’s not to love, right? An arboreal Shakespearean whodunnit. Next on my list.

Try Part 1 of this Suggested Books series—

And feel free to suggest your own favorite “bonsai-adjacent” books below, in the comments—