Spring officially starts next week, and with a warm breeze already blowing through the house, the grass greening three weeks earlier than last year (I know! equal parts thrilling and alarming) and tiny blooms beginning to form on the little dogwood we planted in the fall, I’ve got major Spring Fever and trees on the brain. Lots more to say about it next week, but for today I wanted to share these three (or four) gems with you:

• The Trees Saved Me by Alan Burdick with photos by Nicholas J. R. White (New York Times Gift Link)
This fairly short but beautifully produced story about the Forest of Immortal Stories, a community effort to document and protect 2,544 beech trees in the Romanian mountains (“a land of fog, fictional vampires and real-life wolves, as well as several thousand brown bears and roughly two-thirds of the remaining virgin forest in Europe”) is deeply moving to me.
(See also: Why You Should Plant Oaks. “The oaks in my yard are not just oaks, they are vibrant communities of hundreds of species,” Mr. Tallamy said. …)

• The Architecture of Trees by Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi
One of the biggest (literally) treasures in my small library — pictured above, hand for scale — this book is indescribably great. Created for landscape designers, it is chiefly an atlas of tree species, rendered in fine pen-and-ink drawings, with and without foliage, and in a scale proportional to each other and to the book itself. It contains a few intro/essays that I found utterly fascinating, despite not being a landscape designer (to my frequent chagrin), and pages of spirographs depicting shade patterns and of ink splots acting out seasonal coloration, along with plant-catalog-style descriptions of each of the trees depicted, plus glossary and index. It’s just incredible.

• The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers
And if you are a person who loves, or even worships, trees — or is open to learning why we all should! — and you haven’t read Richard Powers’ The Overstory, I highly recommend it. It’s sort of a lesson on trees (magical beings, so vitally important) in novel form, with at least one character and moment I will never forget until the day I die. Patricia, for years a solo soul, “takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground.” It’s not a perfect book (or my favorite Powers) but the Patricia chapters, among others, are some of my favorite chapters I’ve ever read.

Have a lovely weekend, thank you for being here, and I’ll see you Monday!

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[ IMAGES: Photos of the book The Architecture of Trees © Karen Templer ]