A Tree Can Change Your Life

and other lessons I learned from talking to tree collectors

About ten years ago, I met a guy who told me he collected trees. I thought that was a weird thing to collect, and I told him so. (I’m not real good a small talk.)

Trees are large, and hard to move. I understand people who collect books or teacups or action figures. But trees? How does that even work?

He explained it cheerfully (tree people are remarkably cheerful, there’s a takeaway for you): He hoped to plant one of every kind of tree that grew in his part of Pennsylvania, and he planted them in rows on his property, like books on a shelf. He intended to keep going until he ran out of room.

I thought that was an interesting idea—a tree collection, different from a lavishly landscaped estate or a forest—and I went home and told my husband, the book collector, all about it. He was even more intrigued than I was.

Over the years, I met a few more tree collectors. It was starting to turn into a thing. I briefly considered, then rejected, the idea of writing a book about tree collectors. What would be the point of such a book? It seemed too niche, too narrow, too weird.

Then a couple of things changed.

The first is that the pandemic, and the shutdown that we all endured, led me to spend a lot of time alone in my house with art supplies. I had been an oil painter for years, but in an effort to pass the time and keep my mind off world affairs, I became much better at drawing, watercolor, and mixed media like colored pencils and markers. This made it possible, for the first time, for me to consider illustrating my own book. And when I thought of The Tree Collectors as an illustrated book, it suddenly made more sense. The art would breathe life into the stories, and help to create a world that readers would want to live in.

The second is that the very same shutdown that put art supplies in my hands also led all of us outside, into nature. Trees had a bit of a moment. People embraced books like The Overstory and The Hidden Life of Trees. All at once, trees were a thing.

The book made sense, in a way that it hadn’t ten years ago or even five years ago. Some books are like that: they just have a long germination period.

Now I had to find fifty tree collectors to interview. Collectors tend to know other collectors, so some came to me by referral. There are tree societies that specialize in oaks or maples or palms, and I put out inquiries to those groups. I asked my friends in the horticulture world. I scoured YouTube and TikTok for tree-obsessed people.

I thought I was going to find fifty tree geeks who would talk to me about their particular tree obsession: a person who collected rare fruit trees, maybe, and another who was super into topiaries. And I did find those people, and we did geek out about their very specific corner of the tree collecting world.

But what I didn’t expect was how personal these stories would be. People told me about how trees filled holes in their lives: holes created by loss, illness, and even generational trauma. People told me that trees gave their lives new meaning. And people told me how, through their tree collection, they’d formed a real community. They’d found friends, built families, and connected with their neighbors in a way they never would have otherwise.

The self portrait I drew for my author’s photo: Me, having a relationship with a tree

It is no exaggeration to say that these stories made me laugh, made me cry, and made me question my own life choices. Why didn’t I have a lifelong connection to a piece of land? Why couldn’t I look up into a canopy of branches and recall the occasion, twenty years earlier, when I’d planted the tree to mark a birth, a death, or a new beginning? A tree that would only get more majestic as I got old and weird, and would eventually outlive me?

I’m going to hold a virtual event just for all of you, when we get closer to publication, where I’ll share some of these stories. And I’ll talk more about the illustration process one of these days, because that was a whole new challenge for me.

Meanwhile, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession goes out into the world on July 16. The book tour’s still in the planning stages, but the first few dates are here and I would love to see you when I’m on the road. It would mean a great deal to me if you would pre-order a copy at your local bookstore, or support independent bookstores by ordering online here at Bookshop.org.

This is my fourteenth book, and I can honestly say that none of them have been a labor of love in quite the way this one was. It’s personal and meaningful in a way that I couldn’t have imagined when I started down this road. I hope it means something to you, too.

Here’s a flip-through of the book, for those of you who read this far:

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Paid subscribers are STILL drawing people

We’re on our third week of learning how to add people to urban sketches. The goal is just to be able to populate a scene with little figures like this—but we’re going deep, and learning the basics of human proportions, before we end up here. This is the fun week, where we finally get around to tiny, simple figures like these. We’ll finish up with a live Zoom next week.

For the price of a couple of cheap pencils, or one exceptionally good pencil, you get these little art lessons delivered to your in-box every Friday. You also get access to the whole archive, invitations to the occasional live Zoom, and the satisfaction of helping to keep this little enterprise afloat. Much appreciated.

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The bit at the end

Come find me on Instagram, or see paintings for sale- Right here

Order signed copies of some of my books from my husband’s bookstore, or order my books and many books I love at Bookshop.org

Take one of my online writing or art classes here

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