Branch Library.(books about trees)(Brief Article)(Bibliography)

While walking in South Africa in 1829, the British missionary Robert Moffat came upon a giant fig tree so large that, according to his report, it housed seventeen huts in its branches. The historian Thomas Pakenham, in REMARKABLE TREES OF THE WORLD (Norton), spent four years searching for such giants--"trees with noble brows and strong personalities"--and recording their mythologies. The baobab, native to Africa, Madagascar, and Australia, was of special interest to him; according to African legend, trees were gifts to animals from the Great Spirit, and the hyena, enraged to be given the baobab, speared it into the ground, leaving its tangled roots to become branches. American trees are equally impressive: one of California's ancient sequoias, the "Stratosphere Giant," stands taller than a thirty-story skyscraper.

In 1848, New York needed trees: they were considered the ...