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The Wild Trees
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The Wild Trees (2007) (edit title/settings)

A Story of Passion and Daring

by Richard Preston (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “I think I've found the secret of making a dream come true. ... Just don't stop. Don't ever stop. If someone tells you something is impossible, do that thing first. Prove that it is possible, and keep going.”
    Michael Taylor
  • “Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.”
    Rachel Carson
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • The forest canopies of the earth are believed to hold roughly half of all species in nature.
    Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
  • A redwood fairy ring that has grown old and vast, and has fallen partly into ruin, is known as a cathedral.
    Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers
  • IN ITS FIRST TWENTY YEARS OF LIFE, A COAST REDWOOD CAN GROW from a seed into a tree that’s fifty feet tall. In its next thousand years, it grows faster, adding mass at an accelerating rate. A redwood can go from a seed to a big tree in about six hundred years. Around age eight hundred, which is the end of its youth, it may reach its maximum height—its thirty-something-story height.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • The root sprouts rise up in a circle around the stump. In the fullness of time, the root sprouts can become a circle of redwood trees, which is called a fairy ring.
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • In all, close to 96 percent of the primeval redwood forest was cut down. What is left of the virgin redwood forest is like a few fragments of stained glass from a rose window in a cathedral after the rest of the window has been smashed and swept away.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • HUMANS ARE THE ONLY PRIMATES THAT DO NOT SPEND TIME in trees.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • “There’s always a moment during a climb when you lose yourself,” he said. “You don’t have a name anymore. When you find yourself in a place in nature where if you make a mistake you will die, you become open to what’s around you. You start feeling the limits of your perceptions as a human being. You perceive time more clearly in redwoods, and you see time’s illusory qualities.”
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • “I think I’ve found out the secret of making a dream come true.” “What’s that?” “Just don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. If someone tells you something is impossible, do that thing first. Prove that it is possible, and keep going.”
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • The coast redwood tree seems to be the largest and tallest individual living organism that has appeared in nature since the beginning of life on the planet. (There is something much bigger than a redwood, but it may not be strictly considered an individual. It is an edible fungus called the honey mushroom, or Armillaria, and the largest of those to have been discovered, so far, is a mass that lives mostly underground, putting up individual mushrooms here and there. The whole mass occupies a little over three square miles of the Blue Mountains in northeastern Oregon.)
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
  • The lowest branches on the trunk of a redwood are called epicormic branches. Epicormic branches occur on many kinds of trees. They often arise out of scars left from broken branches, and they often come out in fan-shaped sprays called epi sprays. In redwoods, these branches are not solidly attached to the trunk, and can easily break or fall off the tree.
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
Show all 12 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

One day in the middle of October 1987, a baby-blue Honda Civic with Alaska license plates, a battered relic of the seventies, sped along the Oregon Coast Highway, moving south on the headlands.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Author's Note
Of Botanists and Trees
Maps

1. Vertical Eden
2. The Fall of Telperion
3. The Opening of the Labyrinth
4. Love in Zeus
5. Into the Deep Canopy

Glossary
Acknowledgments

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Richard Preston (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Random House
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2007
ISBN: 1400064899
Page Count: 320

Classification edit see section history

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