Take to the Trees
A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in America's Imperiled Forests
by Marguerite Holloway
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Pub Date 13 May 2025 | Archive Date 30 Apr 2025
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Description
An empowering journey into the overstory with the arborists and forest experts safeguarding our iconic trees.
Journalist Marguerite Holloway arrives at the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop as a climbing novice, but with a passion for trees and a deep concern about their future. Run by twin sister tree doctors Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll, the workshop helps people—from everyday tree lovers to women arborists working in a largely male industry—develop impressive technical skills and ascend into the canopy. As Holloway tackles unfamiliar equipment and dizzying heights, she learns about the science of trees and tells the stories of charismatic species, including hemlock, aspen, Atlantic white cedar, oak, and beech. She spotlights experts who are chronicling the great dying that is underway in forests around the world as trees face simultaneous and accelerating threats from drought, heat, floods, disease, and other disruptions.
As she climbs, Holloway also comes to understand the profound significance of trees in her relationship with her late mother and brother. The book’s rousing final chapter offers something new: a grander environmental and arboreal optimism, in which the story of trees and their resilience meshes with that of people working to steward the forests of the future, and of community found among fellow tree climbers. A lyrical work of memoir and reportage, Take to the Trees sounds the alarm about rapid arboreal decline while also offering hope about how we might care for our forests and ourselves.
About the Author: Marguerite Holloway is is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has written for the New York Times and the New Yorker, among other publications. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, and she lives in New York.
Advance Praise
"Like the trees that it centers, this wonder of a book soars, oxygenates, roots, connects, and awes. It’s a paean to all things arboreal, a memoir about loss and community, and a call to engage in acts of caretaking for our trees and for each other. To do any one of these things well would have made for a good book; to do them all beautifully is a true gift." -Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of I Contain Multitudes and Immense Worlds
"Take to the Trees invites us to contemplate pushing past our own limits up into the treetops, as well as respecting the guidance of trees. I learned much from this wise book, and can only hope that many readers follow this writer up into the highest branches, to gain an understanding of where we are planted on this earth. Holloway’s insights are urgent and necessary." -Sarah Ruhl, MacArthur fellow, playwright, and author of Smile
"In her powerful and affecting book, Marguerite Holloway makes a case for how caretaking trees is really caretaking ourselves, and each other." -Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix
"Take to the Trees is as lyrical and energetic a book as its title would suggest. In this hybrid of participatory journalism, environmental essay, and family memoir, Marguerite Holloway moves with effortless grace among her literary genres, and in so doing teaches us not only the facts but also the poetry of the natural world. One can’t finish this wonderful book without seeing the nonhuman world with new eyes." -Darcy Frey, author of The Last Shot
"The book in part is a sad tale of the damage we have done, but when Marguerite Holloway herself takes to the trees and learns from those who work with them, she plants the seeds of reconciliation between people and the nonhuman world. Readers should take the title literally and do likewise." -William Bryant Logan, author of Sprout Lands
"Powerful and moving, Take to the Trees will resonate with anyone looking for ways to live with optimism and courage through our current era. Just as Marguerite Holloway literally climbs into trees and finds herself, so too does the book explore the connections between trees and the branches of our lives—from the visible canopy to the substantive roots." -Alexandra Horowitz, author of Inside of a Dog and The Year of the Puppy
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781324036449 |
| PRICE | US$28.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 304 |
