History

As mentioned in the previous post, Jill Jonnes’s heralded 2016 book, Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape, is a key resource for educating and inspiring ourselves, our fellow citizens, and our legislators as we seek to protect our urban forests. Here’s a review.

Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Landscape by Jill Jonnes 

Reviewed by Allison Craig, BioForest Urban Forest Health Specialist 

Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Landscape published by Viking Press (2016) is a wonderful read for anyone wanting to travel back in time and immerse themselves in the journey of urban forestry in America. Jonnes takes the reader on a nostalgic and well-thought out tour of iconic urban American trees and landscapes, telling stories of nineteenth-century New York City streets once lined with the exotic and vigorous tree-of-heaven, Washington, D.C.’s love affair with flowering Japanese cherry trees, the lamentable nation-wide decline of the great American chestnut, the death and re-birth of the stately American elm from suburban roadways, and the marvelous recovery of the striking dawn redwood from the depths of China’s forests.

Contemporarily, she recounts the environmental, economic, and emotional strains of the relevant and on-going battles with invasive Asian beetles, highlighting the havoc wreaked by the Asian longhorned beetle and the emerald ash borer to date in America. Her retellings of the original detections and realization of the implications of these pests accurately summarize and reflect a collective feeling of dread, shock, and unease that anyone who has dealt with these beetles has surely experienced. 

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