How to Read a Tree

Ten feet from the door there is a mature and impressive beech tree. I have seen this tree many thousands of times and touched it many hundreds... One spring morning I set myself a challenge...Were there any interesting features on this one beech that I hadn't noticed before?

Looking at the trees around his house, Tristan Gooley realises how little he has noticed, or even really seen them. He decides to embark journey, to investigate the signs that can be read from trees and everything about them that we often overlook.

Tristan takes the reader on a series on micro-expeditions to uncover the signs to look for in each tree. In each journey he highlights at least one exemplary sign or pattern; from the everyday to the more exotic, from Kew Gardens in London to the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Alongside his own observations, insights and deductions, he also meets a variety of experts and draws their wisdom out. He not only reveals the tree signs, but also allows other colourful and intriguing insights to feed in to the narrative.
We will never look at a tree the same way again.