Photograph: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Ten fathoms deep below the Gulf of Mexico, and several miles off the coast of Alabama, lies a submerged cypress forest sprouting with sea anemones. More than 60,000 years old, the cypress trees – some of them 6ft in diameter – were buried in sediments for millennia before they were exposed in 2004 when waves driven by Hurricane Ivan scoured the sea floor.
“Although the trees were dead, they were still standing in place,” writes Daniel Lewis in his global arboreal odyssey, Twelve Trees. Cypress samples brought to the surface could offer clues to the effects of climate on wood from that long-ago era, he explains. But soon after the discovery of the watery forest, salvage companies sought permits to dig up the ancient logs and turn them into furniture.
For much of humanity’s history, trees have been perceived as wondrous beings: we admire them, revere them and conjure dryads from their innards. But for corporations, they’re commodities: a source of timber, rubber, fuel, toilet paper, and the absorbant fluff found inside nappies. They’re also sources of food, medicine, shade and vital habitat for birds, insects and small mammals, as well as lichens, mosses, and ferns.
Most importantly, global forests absorb approximately 7.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, sequestering it in their roots, leaves, branches and trunks. A recent paper in Nature suggests that restoring and protecting fragmented forests could, over time, remove an additional 226 gigatonnes of planet-heating carbon (830 gigatonnes of CO2) from the atmosphere. Yet forests burn at a rate of 22,000 sq ft (2,000 sq metres) per minute in the Amazon, Lewis writes; in Central Africa, 10m acres (4m hectares) of trees disappear every year.
Lewis, an environmental historian at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, considers our urge to both conserve and consume. His journey takes him around the world to ponder the beauty of 12 tree species, mostly the magnificent and often vulnerable, including redwood, sandalwood, baobab and ebony (though humble bonsai trees get a brief nod).
In Cameroon, for example, Lewis contemplates the Central African forest ebony, Diospyros crassiflora. Its jet-black heartwood is highly prized, used to craft piano keys, guitars, door knobs and pool cues. Ebony faces threats including illegal logging and conversion of forests into grazing land or palm oil and rubber plantations. Lewis highlights an initiative to transform the growth and harvesting of ebony in Cameroon, led by Taylor Guitars, supplier to – yes – Taylor Swift.
In 2011, Taylor Guitars co-founder Bob Taylor bought a dilapidated ebony mill in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé and refurbished it to supply wood for his instruments. Five years later, the company partnered with the Congo Basin Institute in Yaoundé to develop ebony tree nurseries and a community-based planting programme. The company also replants ebony and fruit trees that buffer Cameroon’s Dja reserve, a Unesco world heritage site. In 2022, Lewis reports, 27,810 trees were planted.
Trees don’t live in isolation: they are important habitats for myriad plants and animals. Sequoia sempervirens, the redwood that grows in a band along the Pacific coast of North America, can reach heights of more than 100 metres. High in its canopy are soil pockets that support crickets, beetles, molluscs, earthworms and amphibians, including a wandering, skydiving salamander, Aneides vagrans.
Coast redwoods can live for 2,000 years. The olive tree, though rather shorter, can also reach an impressive age: one tree in the “Noah” olive grove in Bchaaleh (northern Lebanon) was recently carbon-dated to more than 1,000 years old.
Although Lewis sometimes veers into extraneous detail, he charms with occasional flights of ecstasy, as when he encounters the mighty ceiba tree, Ceiba pentandra, in Manú national park, a haven of terrestrial biodiversity in south-western Peru – “the most gigantic tree I have ever seen … with enormous buttress roots radiating out in the all directions” He touches the rough bark, circumnavigates the tree, communes with it, climbs into its branches, “trying to bring its world more fully into my own”.
Many of us would like more trees in our world. They represent stability and continuity and, as Lewis notes, forests “feed the planet through a profusion of fruits, vegetables, nuts, spices and other edibles”. They offer splendour, cooling and coherence and, he says, “they need to have their own rights, and be accorded their own dignity”.
• Twelve Trees: And What They Tell Us About Our Past, Present and Future by Daniel Lewis is published by Simon & Schuster (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
