Branching out
In Trees: An Exploration
by Robert Moor
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2026
$39 / 9781476739250
Reviewed by Nina Shoroplova
*
If a book title contains the words tree or canopy or forest, I want to read it. For example, TreeNotes by Nalini Nadkarni; The Tree and The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge; Forest Canopies, an anthology edited by renowned canopy biologists, Nalini Nadkarni and Meg Lowman; Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard; The Hidden Life of Trees,The Power of Trees, and others by Peter Wohlleben; Tree by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady; and from my earliest days of motherhood, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.
Robert Moor is an acclaimed American journalist who won many prizes for his first book On Trails. He has been living at Halfmoon Bay on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast since 2013. His property is backed by native forest, and I was ready for a description of his life surrounded by trees.
In Trees goes much further than that.
When I read “Prologue: Sky,” the opening of In Trees, I wondered where the book was going, because I know trees start their lives by growing a radicle, a root, into the soil. I realized my view of trees was about to be turned upside down and pushed sideways.
Over the course of my research, I eventually came to understand that there are many reasons why trees inspire such powerful feelings of reverence in us. Trees outlive us, expanding our sense of time; they tower over us, putting our lives into perspective; they provide for us, inspiring a sense of gratitude; and they trouble us, challenging us to embrace what John Fowles calls the “green chaos” of the more-than-human world. But there is something else, which, in our tendency to focus solely on the sunny side of arborescence, we too often overlook: A tree is a way of persisting in a world of wounds.
Symbols of trees exist in most world religions and many mythologies, rooting deep into the earth and branching high into the skies and up to heaven: The Tree of Life, The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, The World Tree. These remind us of the reverence people have for trees.
Moor is a journalist who goes to where things are happening, interviews whoever has a great deal of expertise in what he wants to learn and write about, and is very patient in the process. Robert Moor is a curious man. I don’t mean he is strange, but that he is a man whose curiosity is endless. For instance, this book took him ten years to write, ten years in which he researched, traveled, wrote, tried, searched, and sat. Where was he sitting? In trees.
In Trees is Robert Moor’s second book in a trilogy, the first being the much-praised On Trails. The third book will be about constellations: “All three on the topic of how do we make sense of chaos.”1
The word chaos helped me read the various tree topics Moor raises with less reluctance—his topics are wide-ranging.
I padded carefully over to the first chapter “Branching,” in which Moor explains how, as a youngster growing up in Chicago’s suburbs, he used to climb a Norway spruce near his friend Andy’s house. This was before he lost the spirit of a tree climber. Then as an adult, he decided to learn to climb trees again. Moor’s aim, I read, is “to stay forever wild.”
His research to learn this prehensile skill uncovered Ben Atkinson, an arborist and firefighter, then experiencing life in Windermere in England’s Lake District. Ben convinced Robert to go barefoot to where their first tree was growing. Reading this made my toes feel nervous and my feet feel fizzy, and I still have my shoes on. I decided to read this book vicariously, which of course I always do, just the same as when I read those by William Bryant Logan or Robert Macfarlane or Meg Lowman or Diana Beresford-Kroeger. I settled in, and kept turning pages while Robert Moor shared with me the many different ways we can be In Trees.
Robert was not so much training with Ben as climbing with him. First, they climbed an enormous old sycamore, what North Americans would call a sycamore maple. Robert went up and up while his mentor Ben went higher still, lamenting, as he climbed, the loss of a particular branch he used to enjoy; the dead branch had fallen. As Robert looked up through the tree to see his mentor, the branch Robert was sitting on bobbed gently in the wind, and he realized his life was entirely in the tree’s hands. He was exhilarated in a way he hadn’t felt since he was too young to be fearful.
Like Robert Moor, I feel I am a Tree Person, but whereas I write and read articles and books about trees, take photographs of trees from a distance and close-up all year long, and lead tree-identification walks, Moor would take “leave of the earth and scamper into its crown. I liked the way climbing trees made me feel (wilder, humbler).”
Writing on the topic of branching, Moor tells us that the branches of the neurons in our brain are multitudinous at birth, they self-prune into young adulthood, and they gnarl with our habits as we age. This gnarling gives them strength. The brain’s messages go along a neuronal route that is zigzag, like the branches on a magnolia tree. Whereas dendrology is the study of trees, a dendrite in the brain is an arborescent (resembling a tree) form that carries messages between neurons. So, Moor’s leap from climbing the branches of a tree to discussing neuronal routes is not that large.
Reaching out still further though, Moor writes about family trees, and the discoveries made by a genealogist on Moor’s behalf that the author-journalist had long lost relatives who were black, the result of abuse by Moor’s ancestor, a slave owner. Moor meets a cousin of his; they are separated only by generations. She is a black medical doctor. Together, Robert Moor and Gia Gray travel to Alabama to research their family. The harsh and blatant cruelty of this period in North American history is capped, for me, by the lynchings of black people that took place on tree branches.
At the book’s end are the chapters “Resisting” and “Rooting.” Moor describes here how he learns not to climb trees to just feel exhilarated, but to sit in trees, day after day, to resist logging and mining. This requires a patience I can only imagine.
This circles me back to the importance of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation with the Indigenous Peoples of this land. For they are the ones who first valued our native trees. They sought out the best evergreen and deciduous trees for boats, for coffins, for dwellings, for containers, for diapers, for clothing.
In Trees by Robert Moor is neither a fast nor an easy read. But it has arborescently expanded my thinking, increasing my reverence for these great beings around whose foundations we live our lives mindlessly.
*
Photo Silmara Emde
Nina Shoroplova is the author of Legacy of Trees: Purposeful Wandering in Vancouver’s Stanley Park (Heritage House, 2020); Trust the Mystery: Questions, Quotes, and Quantum Wisdom (Influence Publishing, 2015); and Cattle Ranch: The Story of the Douglas Lake Cattle Company (Douglas & McIntyre, 1979). She is a BC Master Gardener and a member of the Botany Committee with Nature Vancouver, writing articles and leading tree-identification walks for these groups, and for the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival. [Editor’s Note: Nina Shoroplova has previously reviewed a book by Lyn Baldwin for The British Columbia Review.]
Notes
2 comments on “Branching out”
Lovely review, lovely book. Thought I’d add, however, that the book TREE mentioned above was written by both David Suzuki and Wayne Grady.
Thanks Genni. Post updated. Ed.