Tree collectors come in many different fashions, as author Amy Stewart explores in her new book, “The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession.” Amy joins me on the podcast this week to discuss tree collecting, what inspired her to write this book, and 10 of the 50 tree collectors she featured in the book.
Amy Stewart lives in Portland, Oregon, and is the New York Times bestselling author of “The Drunken Botanist,” “Wicked Plants” and several other popular nonfiction titles about the natural world. Her books have sold over a million copies worldwide and have been translated into 18 languages.
Amy Stewart is the New York Times bestselling author of several books about the natural world. Her latest is “The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession.” (Photo Credit: Terrence McNally)
Amy began writing books in her 20s. She happened to be planting a garden then so she wrote a memoir about that. “I was living in Santa Cruz at the time, so if I’d gotten into surfing, I might have written a book about surfing or birdwatching or who knows what it could have been?” she says.
Her book on her first garden ended up being more about the people who came to her garden.
“I was interested in storytelling, and I was interested in people and people’s lives, and, and I kept finding a way to do that,” Amy says.
She continued with a book about earthworms that was largely about the people involved in working with and studying earthworms. “I drove around the Midwest and interviewed earthworm scientists, and they’re hilarious, interesting, awesome people,” she says.
Amy first met a tree collector about 10 years ago. After one of her events, someone came up to her and spoke about their tree collection.
“Trees are really hard to move, and they take up a lot of space,” Amy notes. “So, like, you think a book collection’s hard to move, try moving a tree collection — it’s impossible. So I thought that was interesting.”
Though she found it interesting, she didn’t initially know what to do with the information. Over the years, she met more tree collectors, and she notes that her husband, Scott Brown, is a rare book dealer, and there is a lot of talk about collecting in their house.
“There’s a certain type of personality who’s a collector of whatever, whether it’s classic cars or trees or whatever it might be,” Amy says.
She decided to write a book on tree collectors, but she didn’t want to limit herself to people with a lot of land to plant trees on. “I wanted this to be a book for everybody,” she says. “I wanted this to be global, and I didn’t want there to be anyone on the planet who couldn’t relate to it.”
“The Tree Collectors” is about all type of tree collectors, not just those with lots of land to plant trees on.
Amy, for example, lives in a tiny apartment and isn’t in a position to collect trees, so she can’t collect trees in that sense of the word. But someone who catalogs trees or collects parts of a tree, like acorns, wood samples or pine cones, is also a tree collector.
“There are all kinds of ways that someone could be a tree collector, and then once I had thought more globally about my definition, I could think more globally about finding those people,” she says.
She started writing the book during COVID lockdown, and she got on Zoom with people in Ethiopia, Brazil, China, Japan and elsewhere around the world.
“We were both, me and the collector, so happy to just be able to talk to somebody about something as joyful as trees,” Amy recalls.
She interviewed about 100 people around the world to get to the 50 people she included in the book, hiring a translator when the interview subjects were not English speakers.
Collectors recommended other collectors she could speak to, she looked up tree societies, such as the Maple Society or Conifer Society, and also looked outside of traditional horticulture circles, such as people who talk about trees on TikTok and YouTube.
“I really wanted to push out of the horticultural world and to not write about sort of the more — quote, unquote — famous people in the tree world, but to find people that no one’s ever heard of so it really would feel like, ‘Oh, this could be me.’ Like any of us could identify with them,” Amy says.
“Our relationship with trees is a little different from our relationship with other plants, and it took me a while to figure out why,” she shares. “Like, why do we feel about trees in a way that maybe we don’t feel about sunflowers or tomato plants? And I think part of part of it is that they’re so much older than us. They live beyond our lifespan. And they’re so much larger than us. … In a typical day, we don’t encounter anyone or anything who’s so much physically larger and also longer lived.”
Amy is also a talented artist, working in colored pencil and watercolor. She illustrated her own book, which really brought it to life.
“That was a fun part of this for me,” Amy says. “I felt like if I illustrated this book, it would sort of feel like all these people lived in a world together. Like it would unify them all. … When you draw someone’s portrait, there’s a real intimacy that you feel, a real connection you feel with the person. So that was this lovely sort of collaborative process.”
The subjects sent photos of themselves for Amy to use as reference, so they got to decide how they would be portrayed.
“There was this lovely feeling of, ‘we’re doing this together.’ That meant a lot to me,” Amy says.
The illustrations took me back to elementary school. Amy says she deliberately chose colored pencil and watercolor so the illustrations would look like the kind of drawings she makes in her sketchbook casually.
Amy illustrated her book too, including a self-portrait.
The Arctic Arborist
One of the tree collectors featured in Amy’s book is Kenneth Høegh, who is of mixed Danish and Inuit descent, and he lives in Greenland.
“Southern Greenland did have trees at one time but they were cut down as we humans tend to do, and now there’s sheep grazing there, which keeps it a pretty treeless landscape,” Amy says.
Kenneth said to Amy, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to never see a tree.”
For Kenneth, where he grew up, literally no one had a tree. He asked his dad if they could plant one, and his father had to go to great lengths just to find one to plant.
Now, in his spare time, Kenneth goes around the world looking for trees along the Arctic line that can also grow in Greenland. He is creating an arboretum where he’s just trying to find out what trees will grow successfully. Today, Kenneth has been involved in having 125 species of trees planted on 370 acres of land.
Because it takes so long for trees to grow, Kenneth says it will be up to the next generation to decide what the trees will be for. It could be a botanical garden, a forest — for timber production or carbon sequestration — or just ornamental.
The Tiny Forester
Shubhendu Sharma started out as an engineer at the Toyota plant in Bangalore, India. He was tracing the life cycle of materials used in building cars, back to their original source. Often, the origins are a natural product. But the only place the material goes after it’s used in a car is to the junkyard.
“We’re participating in a cycle that takes things out of the earth and turns them into junk, and eventually, we will run out,” Amy says. “Like, someday that cycle will end.”
Shubhendu attended a talk by a Japanese botanist, Akira Miyawaki, who was invited to The Toyota campus to speak and plant a tree.
Shubhendu learned “when you plant trees, when you make a forest somewhere, it’s regenerative. It’s working with nature, not against it. It’s building something for the future, and it knows how to do that more or less by itself,” Amy says. “So he got very into this idea of planting these tiny little forests that are very dense. It’s a very particular planting method. And the thing about it is, it’s not reforestation. It’s what he calls afforestation. So it’s putting a small forest where one hasn’t been before or hasn’t been in a long time.”
Dr. Miyawaki, known as “the forest keeper,” had developed a method of planting tiny forests as a way to recover land that had been decimated in war. It became hugely popular and he became wildly famous traveling the world, installing these mini-forests, and they were very successful and fast growing.
I first learned about the Miyawaki forest method a few years ago from Andrew Lampl, a Miyawaki forest specialist who works at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Though our last names are the same — aside from an apostrophe in mine — I can’t say for certain if we are related.) Andrew has a presentation on the Miyawaki forest that you can watch on YouTube to familiarize yourself with the method.
Shubhendu quit his job to create Miyawaki forests around the world. He’s up to 4.5 million trees in over 44 cities around the world. I love what he’s doing, and apparently he does too.
These “forests” can be as small as a couple of parking spaces or a tennis court. The idea is to take ragged, little unused parcels of land, like along a freeway, a vacant lot, or a corporate campus, and plant trees, Amy explains.
“I love the idea that nature’s going to take it from here,” she says. “You got a little bit of work to do in the first couple years, and then you just stand back and let it go.”
A watercolor by Amy Stewart in “The Tree Collectors.”
The Habitat Builder
Don Mahoney’s property near San Francisco was connected to a vacant lot. He slowly and sneakily populated it with trees to attract wildlife. He was successful, and he counted 22 species of birds there one Christmas Day.
Don, a professional arborist, was very careful in his record keeping, which Amy says is part of the collector mindset. “You’re keeping a little notebook and you’re making observations about how many species of bees do you see on your land, how many species of birds come through, and you’re keeping those kinds of records. There’s a huge value in that, not just for your own enlightenment, but that’s actually a useful historical record that a hundred years from now, somebody might really wanna look at that.”
The Filmmaker
“Taming the Garden” is a documentary about an oligarch in the country of Georgia.
“He had this idea that he wanted to build this incredible tree collection, but the way he did it was by going around and digging up majestic trees, usually out in the countryside almost entirely on the property of pretty poor people who really couldn’t afford to say no to him,” Amy explains. “He made offers they couldn’t refuse. And so there’s these haunting images of these mature trees on barges either floating across the water or being driven up the road. It’s a beautiful haunting, disturbing film.”
She had wanted to interview the billionaire oligarch but learned how difficult it is to get close to billionaire oligarchs. So she interviewed the documentary filmmaker who made the film, Salomé Jashi. “She’s fantastic, and she has such incredible things to say about the people and how they were affected by losing these trees,” Amy says.
“Some of these people really cried as the trees were taken away,” she adds. “These were trees that their grandparents lived under and been in their family, sometimes, for generations.”
Salomé also examined what happened to the trees when they ended up at the oligarch’s pseudo-public park, where people can go see the trees that survived. Many did not survive being dug up and moved, as best practices for tree moving had not been followed.
“I count her as a tree collector in the sense that she collected up this story,” Amy says.
The Oak Collector
Béatrice Chassé moved from Brussels to France, where she bought a big piece of land and wanted to plant trees. Her partner suggested she pick a focus, and Béatrice realized that oaks were a natural fit for that part of France.
“I don’t think even she realized at the time how diverse oaks are around the world, how many different places you have to go to get them,” Amy says. “And she got really interested in this idea of planting oaks that she either grew from seed or knew the provenance of — knew exactly where it came from.”
Béatrice has a certified private arboretum and now the largest oak collection in France. She has 319 species of oaks in her collection.
Some of her oaks don’t have the distinct oak leaf-shape that we associate with oaks, so people ask Béatrice, well then, what makes an oak, an oak? The answer, of course, is the acorn.
Amy noted that tree collectors provide “backup copies” of the genetics of trees, in case something happens to the wild trees.
Amy’s book also highlights both human and non-human seed collectors.
The Collector’s Collector
Ben Askren, the city arborist of Aurora, Ohio, has planted a tree museum in a public park.
“He had this idea going back to when he was in college, that he really wanted to be able to see trees grouped together taxonomically so he could better understand how they’re related to one another,” Amy says.
Typically, to get from one type of maple to another, you’d have to hike a really long way. Ben designed parks where trees that are close relatives are grouped together, so the differences will be obvious.
He also plants trees according to when they first appeared in the fossil record.
“You start with the most ancient trees that were around when the dinosaurs were here, and you move on through till then we start getting into flowering trees. And then we get into trees that appeared more recently, and you can take a walk and it’s like you’re walking through time.”
He didn’t stop there. He also endeavors to have one of every state tree, and he collects trees with historical significance and novelty trees.
He now has 480 tree species in the collection, including clones of historic trees.
“You never know when your crazy idea is going to finally have an opportunity to come to fruition, and that’s his and I love it,” Amy says.
The Peach Caretaker
Reagan Wytsalucy is based in Utah but grew up in New Mexico, where she didn’t know much about her Navajo heritage. When she went off to college, she needed a senior project, and her father mentioned the Navajo peach trees.
She learned that during the Long Walk of the Navajo, in the 1860s, the U.S. Army destroyed all the peach tree orchards that had been on Navajo land.
The Navajo were forced by the federal government and the Army to relocate from the New Mexico territory, including modern-day Arizona, to a detention camp in eastern New Mexico. “To make matters worse, they came along behind them and destroyed really their whole way of life to make sure that they had nothing to come back to,” Amy says.
She noted that there are records of this in the National Archives. “Because it was the Army, and they recorded everything they did, and said, ‘Today I destroyed 500 of the most beautiful peach trees I’ve ever seen.’” she says.
One of Reagan’s ancestors stayed behind, hid out, and protected the few peach trees and livestock that were left. When some Navajo walked back, he was there with these resources.
“Reagan’s dad told her about this and said, ‘You know, those peach trees are still out there, some of them, and you could do that. You could go find these peach trees and you could potentially grow them. Bring them back.’ And that’s what she’s doing. And she’s the youngest collector in the book, and she’s the only one who said to me, ‘I feel like I found my purpose. I am on a divine path with these trees.’’
The Highest Bidder
There is a whole industry of rare tree auctions most people are unfamiliar with. Rare and unusual trees are often auctioned as fundraisers for tree societies.
“Sometimes those would be trees that are discovered in the wild,” Amy says. It could also be weird and unusual trees on private land or in nurseries.
Sara Malone is a Northern California tree collector who loves to travel to these auctions and bid. She brings a horse trailer to Oregon to take trees back home with her from auctions. She has over 2,000 species of trees on her property now.
“When you do have a lot of trees, you have to kind of be an editor of those trees as well,” Amy says. “Like things get to be too big, they get diseased, they crowd out other things, they were poor choices. And this is true of any collector who collects anything. If you’re a stamp collector, you’ve probably made some choices you regret early on because you didn’t know what you were doing. And that’s true for trees as well. So taking them out and making those kinds of decisions is something you have to do when you’ve got a big collection like that.”
Steve Jobs’ Arborist
David Muffly is the “tree whisperer” of Apple Park, the headquarters of Apple Inc. in Cupertino, California.
David got interested in trees with a student at Stanford University in California. He got involved with an eco-commune, just off the Stanford campus, called Magic, where people can enjoy free room and board if they do good works for the environment. The commune project at the time was to plant oak trees in an area the Stanford Dish, a massive satellite dish radio telescope that’s on a piece of land that Stanford University owns.
He went on to do other tree-related things with his wife, and one day many years later got a call from somebody at Apple saying, ‘Steve Jobs wants to talk to you.’
“So unbeknownst to him, that was Steve Jobs’ favorite place to walk, was the Dish, and Steve Jobs had been watching that whole time,” Amy says.
Steve Jobs was a tree fanatic, and David spoke to Steve Jobs about his vision of what trees to plant at the Apple campus, emphasizing native trees and what the climate would be in another 40 years.
“it is sort of interesting to see what can happen when a giant corporation with a lot of money gets involved in a tree collection,” Amy says. “They’ve got the resources to do some interesting things.”
The Noah’s Ark of Plants
Tom Cox of the Cox Arboretum and Gardens in Canton, Georgia, lives not too far from me. He unfortunately died before the book came out, but Amy had the pleasure of interviewing him and featuring him in her book.
Tom had bought 13 acres of rural land in Georgia long ago. He is not a rich land baron — the land was affordable on his phone company salary.
Tom connected with tree organizations, traveled around the world, got to know elite people in the horticulture world and grew some very rare and unusual trees, Amy explains. Some trees were found in the wild after everyone thought they were extinct. Some are new varieties of trees that plant breeders are still working on. He had one tree that is only known to be in the wild in three places.
His one plot represents many different types of land, and the trees demonstrate the variety of species that can be grown on various land types, speaking to what grows in Georgia and throughout the southeastern United States.
Tom had no classic or formal horticultural or arboreal training but he had an encyclopedic mind for botanical plant names. Between that and his Southern charm and personality, people just loved him. The professional plant geeks and the tree people took him under their wings because he was a cool guy and a quick learner.
“Something that trees bring up for all of us is aging and mortality and the fact that they will go on without us,” Amy says. “And I think being able to sort of remind people that wherever we are in life, whatever life is thrown at you, he has this connection to trees that kept him going and really, that along with his family, made life really meaningful for him.”
Amy’s delightful illustrations are a big appeal of “The Tree Collectors.”
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Amy Stewart on tree collectors. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Do you have an unusual or rare tree? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
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Episode 206: Our Most Essential Trees: The Nature of Oaks, with Doug Tallamy
Episode 245: The Hidden Life of Trees, with Peter Wohlleben
Episode 265: Finding the Mother Tree: How Trees Take Care of Each Other, with Suzanne Simard
Episode 364: Easy Ways to Help Heal Earth in Suburban and Urban Landscapes
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
Earthbound Expeditions: Discover South Africa with Joe Lamp’l
Amy Stewart on Instagram | @amystewart
Amy Stewart on X | @amy_stewart
“The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession” by Amy Stewart
“The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks” by Amy Stewart
“Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities” by Amy Stewart
“Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects” by Amy Stewart
“Gilding the Lily” by Amy Stewart
“Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers” by Amy Stewart
“The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms” by Amy Stewart
“From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden” by Amy Stewart
“Taming the Garden” film trailer
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Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Greenhouse Megastore, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
