LAUSR

Jill Jonnes, a distinguished author of books on urban places, has written a lively book on trees in American cities in her Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape. She was a founder of the Baltimore Tree Trust and has immersed herself in the effects of climate change on cities and how urban areas might help mitigate its impacts. Urban Forests is the result of her professional training as a historian and her love of cities. Jonnes begins her history in the nineteenth century with the introduction of the ginko and ailanthus into East Coast cities andmoves quickly into the Gilded Age, which is her specialty. She tells stories through such entertaining characters as Thomas Jefferson and plant collector William Hamilton, J. Sterling Morton (founder of Arbor Day), Charles Sprague, and a myriad other men and women who enter stage right and exit stage left. Joyce Kilmer is here, as well, author of the poem BTrees,^ 1908 Columbia University graduate, who was killed by a sniper in the First World War. All the most famous tree stories of America come to life here—the exotics, the diseases, the invasives, and the constant search to restore American elms and American chestnuts to their place in cities and suburbs. The first half of the book is episodic—many chapters on many subjects (11 chapters in 160 pages)—so, reader, be prepared to jump from topic to topic, which may prove disconcerting. It is fun to learn about the origins of famous arboretums and their founders, how Washington, D.C. became America’s flowering cherry capital, and the miraculous delivery of the dawn redwood from the precipice of extinction. Jonnes has a good grasp of dendrology and taxonomy, although it is a bit irritating to have sentences broken up by parenthetical explanations of such terms as Bstomata (from the Greek stoma for mouth).^ A glossary would have served her well, as would a cast of characters, similar to those in Victorian novels. Jonnes, however, takes a more focused approach in the last half of the book, which covers the late twentieth century and the first decade of the 21st. When we meet Rowan Rowntree in the chapter entitled BDon’t Trees Clean the Air,^ Jonnes uses him and his colleagues to guide us through America’s struggles to incorporate urban plant science into the quest for environmental health and climate change. Rowntree, who is as responsible as any scientist for efforts to link urban trees and environmental health, returns several times in the final chapters to lead the charge for integrating trees into the urban planning process. BRowan Rowntree’s gift was translating science into data on the multiple benefits of trees, casting green as a great municipal investment even for those with no particular affection for trees.^ Jonnes continues to follow the trail of invasive pests, such as the emerald ash borer and Asian long-horned beetle, in the final chapters, but her chief emphasis is on trees and urban health. She has advice for activists to form or join local advocacy groups, to personally invest something of themselves into the fight for their city’s and their neighborhood’s health. Urban Forests is a wonderful romp through the history of urban trees, but I would have liked to see many of Jonnes’ stories tied into the more general history of landscape manipulation and landscape studies. All the efforts to preserve and restore species, to fight invasives, and plant tees for posterity are part of a larger American story. In his essay, BThe Imitation of Nature,^ Jackson (1970) wrote that * John Sinton [email protected]