Some are over 100 meters tall, a few live over 5,000 years, while others drink nearly 2,000 liters of water daily. As imperious as they are delicate, magnificent and, at times, strange, trees are at the heart of our lives. Three albums have chosen to put in their spotlight those who, so often, offer us their shade.
Author of Be a tree!, Maria Gianferrari learned that “trees exchange information with each other thanks to their intertwined roots, with the help of a particular network of fungi, which is affectionately called the Wood-Wide Web, the mycorrhizal network. This network, she adds, allows “trees in a forest to protect each other and take care of each other, like members of a family.”
Based on this fact, it invites us to become a tree, to discover their constitution and the fundamental role they play in ecosystems. Supported by the illustrations of Felicita Sala – dense, iridescent and immersive -, she draws a parallel between human and forestry existences, insisting, not without a certain candor, on the elements that bind us: “Make your leaves dance in the wind, breathe in the fresh air, swallow the sun, let them feed you as they feed the whole world. The result is an invitation to link our roots and to sow, around us, a renewed solidarity with the living, in all its forms.
Between branches
The hymn to life that offers us It all starts with a seed takes shape in the random flight of a samara. Pushed at random by the wind, this seed of a few grams is the genesis of potential lives. This is the strength of the staging poetized by Laura Knowles and illustrated by Jennie Webber: the birth of a tree and, with it, a multitude of lives that come to seek support, shade or nourishment.
Supported by Dominique Fortier’s translation, the verses punctuate these existences which take shape. Thus, over the pages, the tree in germ is erected into a massive maple, whose branches, lost in the clouds, and the roots, sunk deep into the earth, go beyond the scope of the album. Life overflows, in fact, inviting an abundant flora and fauna in the dance of its branches: “Critters and birds are busy, / Race with squirrels / Between the walls of living bark / From their house of leaves. “
The imaginary herbarium
Trees don’t always get the recognition they deserve. Many of us struggle to name the species that, however, live under our windows. But what about the species that Olivier Tallec presents to us in The book of trees and plants that remain to be discovered ? Not satisfied with some 60,000 known species of trees that inhabit the Earth, the insatiable author has created about twenty, seeded in the fertile soil of humor.
The format is very simple, just a review of imagined trees, but we quickly get caught up in the game, curious to discover the next find. From tree to tree, in this hebertism of the imagination, Tallec finds new ways of taking us by the side: “The hammer tree – How many times will we have to say it? WE-NE-NEVER-NAPPED UNDER A HAMMER-TREE! “