Beth Moon's fourteen-year quest to photograph ancient trees has taken
her across the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
Some of her subjects grow in isolation, on remote mountainsides, private
estates, or nature preserves; others maintain a proud, though often
precarious, existence in the midst of civilization. All, however, share
a mysterious beauty perfected by age and the power to connect us to a
sense of time and nature much greater than ourselves. It is this beauty,
and this power, that Moon captures in her remarkable photographs.
This handsome volume presents nearly seventy of Moon's finest tree
portraits as full-page duotone plates. The pictured trees include the
tangled, hollow-trunked yews--some more than a thousand years old--that
grow in English churchyards; the baobabs of Madagascar, called
"upside-down trees" because of the curious disproportion of their giant
trunks and modest branches; and the fantastical dragon's-blood trees,
red-sapped and umbrella-shaped, that grow only on the island of Socotra,
off the Horn of Africa.
Moon's narrative captions describe the natural and cultural history of
each individual tree, while Todd Forrest, vice president for
horticulture and living collections at The New York Botanical Garden,
provides a concise introduction to the biology and preservation of
ancient trees. An essay by the critic Steven Brown defines Moon's unique
place in a tradition of tree photography extending from William Henry
Fox Talbot to Sally Mann, and explores the challenges and potential of
the tree as a subject for art.
