H enrik Sjöman is Scientific Curator at the Gothenburg Botanical Garden and a Senior Researcher in landscape architecture at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp. His research sits at the intersection of urban forestry and plant geography: which trees, drawn from which wild habitats around the world, can deliver the ecosystem services we now ask of city plantings — shade, stormwater management, biodiversity, carbon storage — under a climate that is no longer the one the textbooks were written for.
His fieldwork takes him to neglected centres of tree diversity: collecting expeditions to the southern Caucasus, the Balkans and other regions where species grow under the water stress and exposure that cities now mimic. The findings feed directly into peer-reviewed work on drought tolerance, intraspecific variation and species selection for a warming Europe, and into his teaching of urban planners, landscape architects and tree nurseries across the continent.
With Arit Anderson he co-authored The Essential Tree Selection Guide, an A–Z of more than five hundred trees chosen for the climates we are planting into rather than the ones we used to assume.
