If there’s a few books I can entice you to buy, one of them would be by the author David George Haskell. Even if you don’t like reading a whole lot, are bored by non-fiction and put to stupor by poetry, I would still recommend the two books he has out. And yes they have all those qualities - they’re booklike (chapters and all), have got sciencey facts and they sing like poetry. But really they’re nothing like their usual parent genres. They don’t sound scientific, they don’t use iambic pentasomething or incomprehensible cadenced phrasing. Instead they flow. It’s like David Attenborough was smoothed into delicious paper form and developed a lifelong passion for flora instead of fauna. Haskell uses the fancy terminology that you’d expect from a professor of biology (which he is) but unexpectedly your brain skips by that and understands his meaning regardless.

I’ve learned a lot from these books. Within Haskell’s first book The Forest Unseen I first heard the term mycelium (which I was then amused to find had been appropriated by the new Star Trek series) and the more ST-tempting world wide web-like world of mycorrhizal networks. I learned for the first time that forest trees can communicate across the forest with each other. I learned that peeling the bark off trees (turns out I was a child menace) can be incredibly damaging, as the tree’s water and nutrients only travel in this outer layer of rings. Overall I gained some (though quickly draining) knowledge of plants and the miraculous ways they can work.

One of the more fascinating species covered by Haskell in his second book is that of the Sabal Palms. It turns out.. Palms aren’t trees. Who would have thought? Palms are huge, ubiquitous and we certainly plant and prune them like any city dwelling perennial. The distinction though perhaps trivial is one that helps them survive - and of that survival, Haskell paints the most glorious picture of it. Imagine a palm, felled by the great sea currents. A struggle against both drought and salt. A poor man building his house on shifting sands. The ability to adapt and move on, elevated to a new parable. The sound of crackling explosions during forest fires, with the burnt trunks of sabals remaining. The slow grows spouting from their hidden core of water storage. Their resilience and hardiness. It’s a pretty exciting image.

The long lives of trees are a fascination to me and probably to you too. To think that something could be alive and stable for hundreds of years - a thing appearing so lumbering and unadaptable. To learn that for many trees (or palms) it appears we don’t necessarily even know their longevity expands my realisation of just how many species are out there. Sabal palms grow slow it turns out. They take about 60 years for their initial growth after they’ve burrowed successfully into the sand. Beyond that though? One estimate suggests only 100 generations separate the modern Sabal Palms along the US coasts to those sprouting from the Ice age. They are adventuring opportunists, surfing the sands and seeding thousands in the hope of successful propagation.

All species have their unique wondrous component, yet the Sabal Palm to me felt like the plucky underdog of a tale. Though tenuously linked to humanity’s ever more precarious position in nature, it felt like I could take a leaf from this tree’s book (they have fronds, not leaves). The lessons of tolerance, adaptation and hardiness in weathering elements are rich in the tree’s history. It has the reserve of a water-filled core to survive the fires. It acts as a bulwark to hold back the seas and protect more delicate nature behind it from salinating destruction. It is a source of life and enablement in a difficult environment. These are all things I believe humans should be for each other and for nature.