The spirit of nineteenth-century exploration lives in British historian Thomas Pakenham, who has spent the last decade investigating the lives of the world's most dramatic trees, many of which are in danger of destruction. After the worldwide success of his previous work, Meetings with Remarkable Trees-a stunning collection of trees in Britain and Ireland chosen for their unusually strong personalities-Pakenham decided to hunt down and photograph remarkable trees scattered around the globe. Many of these trees were already famous-champions by girth, height, volume, or age-while others had never previously been caught by the camera. Although North American trees dominate this book, Pakenham's five-year odyssey also took him to remote regions in Mexico, all over Europe, parts of Asia including Japan, northern and southern Africa, Madagascar, Australia, and New Zealand. Despite Pakenham's expert knowledge, the book owes little to conventional botany. Remarkable Trees of the World is arranged according to the characters of the trees themselves: there are Giants and Dwarfs, Methuselahs, Shrines, Dreams, Lovers and Dancers, Ghosts, and Trees in Peril. The chief Giant is General Sherman in the Sierra Nevada, California. At over 1,400 tons, the grizzled old general, a giant sequoia, is the world's largest tree measured by volume-indeed, the largest single living thing in the world.

The height record, however, goes to another commanding Californian, a 368-foot-high Coast redwood recently declared the tallest tree in the world. Among the Methuselahs, Pakenham describes the wind-blasted bristlecone pines of the White Mountains of California. One of them, Old Methuselah himself, was found to be 4,600 years old, making him the oldest tree measured by scientists. Shrines include some of the holiest trees in the world, like the immense camphor trees preserved in Shinto shrines in Japan and the 2,200-year-old Bo-tree in Sri Lanka, a cutting from the tree under which Buddha found enlightenment. Trees in Peril are the trees under attack by predatory loggers and impoverished farmers, including the exotic baobabs of Madagascar, now threatened by intensive farming, and the great spruce and Douglas firs and red cedars of Pacific North America, in whose defense the conservationists have been fighting the loggers for decades. Remarkable Trees of the World is a magnificent new work that celebrates Pakenham's gifts as a writer and a photographer. It will be treasured for generations by all those who marvel at the wonders of nature.