TreeStack! In Praise of People who Praise Trees

Could you use a few more trees in your daily feed?

May 31, 2024

Some of my favorite people are trees

I’ve spent the last few years interviewing people who collect trees for my new book, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. Over that time I’ve gotten to know and appreciate any number of people who write about trees. Today I want to share some of them with you, in case you’d like to have more trees in your daily scroll.

I’m illustrating this with my own art, but many of these newsletters feature beautiful art and photography and I hope you’ll go check them out and maybe subscribe to a few of them.

One of my favorite newsletters comes from

Bill Russell

, who writes

Illustrated Journalism

. Recently he highlighted an artist I’ve loved for years, Andie Thrams. Her forest paintings are mysterious and wonderful. Here’s what he wrote about her:

Thrams' art materials are basic, like ink, pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper. She'll often use twigs dipped in ink, local stream and sea water, along with various natural elements like fungi, soil, leaves, seaweed, sap, or bark to beautifully stain her paper.

Go take a look! She’s fantastic. Bill followed this with another excellent post about artists who draw trees, and he taught me about a personality test based on drawing trees:

Did you Take the Tree-Drawing Test?
The Baum Test is an easy way to assess your personality and any underlying emotions you’re experiencing. You just draw a tree, then write about it or talk about it. The parts of the tree symbolizes one's self-image. Your own interpretations are what count. Take the tree-drawing test here.

I love this illustrated post from

Candace Rose Rardon

in her

Dandelion Seeds: Illustrated Essays

in which she writes about a massive Deodar cedar in her nearby park. I look out at one of these trees every day from my window, and I appreciate her appreciation of it!

Another art-related tree post is this beautiful piece on a dying magnolia in the garden of a famous artist from

Helen Reynolds

Workbook

I interviewed Paul Wood for my book because I was so impressed with his project to catalog and enthuse over London’s street trees, and because cataloging trees is a form of collecting them. He writes these wonderful posts about individual spectacular British and Irish trees in

The Street Tree

, and I am here for it! I particularly love The Hungry Tree, which has eaten a park bench.

Paul makes me think that every city should have a tree-appreciator who publishes a newsletter praising individual wonderful trees in their city, so please start that project, everybody.

Trees Telling Stories

is a fun goofy newsletter about…well, trees telling stories. I particularly like this one, about William Shatner, who has recently released a weird funny song called I Want to Be a Tree:

Another good funny wonderful TreeStack is

The JewsLoveTrees Newsletter

from

Tobin Mitnick

, author of a cool book called Must Love Trees. I don’t even know which post to pick as my favorite, but I am awfully fond of this one about a batshit crazy redwood tree murder scene in an old Kirk Douglas movie called The Big Trees. Please subscribe and encourage him to keep doing what he’s doing, which is making me laugh.

Bulletin of Remarkable Trees

hasn’t been updated lately, but I’m posting it here in hopes that it might.

Sarah K Stricker

write about her grandfather, E. Lowell Kammerer, a landscape architect, arboriculturist, and curator of collections at the Morton Arboretum from the late 1920s until 1966. This is an incredibly cool project and I think that everybody who has an amazing ancestor who left behind a trove of papers should absolutely do a deep dive and share it with us all, so thank you, Sarah, and I hope there’s more to come.

Another worthy newsletter that hasn’t been updated lately is

Fire Escape Bonsai

, about

Max Falkowitz

’s attempts to grow bonsai on his fire escape in Queens. I deeply regret that I didn’t find out about Max until after I’d finished all the interviews for my book, because I do love an urban fire escape tree collector. Anyway, check out his lessons from three years of bonsai gardening, and maybe you’d like to read his new newsletter on tea,

Leafhopper

Along those lines, I’m also enjoying

Growing Trees at Home

from

Jenn Taft

, which is a good reminder that you can pick up tree seeds, grow them in pots, and enjoy your time with them. Just do that, and see how you get on.

I love

Anne of Green Places

, all the way from Grenoble, France, and I would please like everyone who lives in a beautiful interesting part of France to write a newsletter and tell us about it. In particular, this post about trees and paintings of trees is lovely.

There are probably many other tree art projects out there that I’m missing, but one I enjoyed was from the photography newsletter

PappasBland

, which recently did this beautiful post about photographing the shadows of trees. So good!

And a shout-out to the UK’s

The Tree Council

for their newsy and often feisty

Tree Talk

. I wish more tree advocacy groups and arboretums would put out a Substack, tell some stories, and share a bit of themselves in a more informal and approachable way. Good on them.

I’m going to finish with someone who isn’t on Substack but is so fantastic that I’m putting him here anyway, as a reward for those of you who’ve read this far: Francisco Aronja, whose Arboles de la CDMX (Trees of Mexico City) project lights up Instagram and TikTok. Here he is talking about how the water and heat crisis in Mexico City is impacting the trees. It doesn’t matter if you don’t speak Spanish. He speaks the universal language of trees. I was honored to interview him for my book and I think he’s one of the most interesting tree people out there today.

Who do you read, follow, and enjoy on the subject of trees, whether they’re here on Substack or not?

Paid subscribers are adding COLLAGE to their sketchbooks

Drawing? Painting? Writing? Collage? If you can do it in a sketchbook, we get into it. Over the last few weeks we’ve been diving into travel sketching, ahead of summer vacation season. This week, we look at very simple approaches to collage in sketchbooks. It doesn’t have to be a gigantic undertaking! You can pick up a sticker at a bookstore, tear a bit of a map out of a brochure, glue on some random piece of colored paper, and have a little collage to brighten up your sketchbook.

For the price of a good drawing pen, join us and help support this enterprise generally. You’ll get access to an entire archive of cool sketchbook stuff.