T he Essential Tree Selection Guide has been reviewed by Anna Richardson in landskap, the Swedish journal of landscape architecture — a thoughtful piece that turns on what it might mean to talk about trees properly.
“I had hoped that this would be the reaction,” Henrik Sjöman tells the magazine. “When the tree books were published in Sweden a couple of years ago, people began talking about trees in a way they hadn’t done before.” Sjöman is scientific curator at the Gothenburg Botanical Garden, senior researcher in landscape architecture at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp, and a long-standing columnist for landskap itself.
The argument of the book, Richardson writes, is that the language around trees should reach beyond height and bloom. The vocabulary needs to include what a tree actually requires in order to deliver what we now ask of urban planting — stormwater management, shade, shelter from wind, biological diversity, the regulation of air pollution, and the simple business of giving people somewhere green to be.
I had hoped that this would be the reaction. When the tree books were published in Sweden a couple of years ago, people began talking about trees in a way they hadn’t done before.
— Henrik Sjöman, in landskap
The Essential Tree Selection Guide is organised in four parts: ecosystem services and how trees deliver them; the tolerance of different trees in different environments; an A–Z introduction to more than 550 species and cultivars; and finally a quick-reference selection table. Sjöman says he hopes to see copies of the book fat with Post-it notes — readers moving back and forth between table and entries, looking up trees as the question demands.
To carry the conversation onward, Sjöman and Arit Anderson plan a series of talks and seminars at Kew Gardens in London this spring, opening the book’s argument out to a broader public. Our thanks to Anna Richardson, and to the editors at landskap.
Anna Richardson’s review, in landskap.
