Читать книгу The Trees of San Francisco онлайн

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All in all, if you liked the first edition, I think you’ll love the second!

WRITING this book allowed me to combine two passions: trees and San Francisco.

Although I’m a botany amateur, I’ve always had a love for trees. I grew up in the hardwood forests of upstate New York, with maples, beeches, birches, and oaks; palm trees were things you saw on television in exotic vacation locales (like California). So when I moved to San Francisco in 1984, I was delighted to discover an entire urban forest that was almost completely alien to me—full of trees with strange shapes, exotic scents, unusual bark, colorful flowers, and leaves that stayed on the trees year-round. The one unifying feature among all these species was their unfamiliarity.

A few years later, I began volunteering with San Francisco’s nonprofit Friends of the Urban Forest. Over many years of Saturday-morning plantings and tree-care days with this organization, I became acquainted with the exotic varieties from around the world that have found their way to San Francisco’s streets and parks. As I got to know the city’s trees, I became familiar with their stories: their origins, histories, smells, textures and shapes, reproductive tricks, and relationships with Homo sapiens.