Irish artist Katie Holten has "always felt like a plant-person, moss and lichen covered." In a stunning new anthology, The Language of Trees, Holten collects essays, poetry, and aphorisms on trees from roughly 70 contributors, ancient and modern, and translates them into her Trees font, a custom-made arboreal alphabet consisting of hand-drawn trees. The result is a thoughtful, wide-ranging celebration of trees and forests and an urgent call to preserve and bolster them before it is too late.
Ross Gay, in his introduction, calls Holten's collection a "gratitude immense"--for its "gathering of wonderers and lovers of the arboreal," and Holten's Trees font, which appears letter by letter above some shorter quotes and as a dense, multispecies forest accompanying longer essays and other prose. Holten's contributors--a diverse group in race, gender, and nationality--include climate scientists (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Eduardo Kohn), activists (Winona LaDuke, Kinari Webb), poets (Ada Limón, Sumana Roy), and novelists (Richard Powers, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula K. Le Guin). Their pieces include essays on botany and forestry; a recipe for acorn bread; an excerpt from Robert Macfarlane's dictionary of place-words; even song lyrics from Radiohead. They are eloquent, wry, heartrending, multifaceted, and insistent, united in their deep love for trees and their passion for sustaining the world's forests. As Holten says in her afterword, this collection is "a love letter to our vanishing world, written with Trees." It's also a beautiful, artistic rendering of the many ways trees nourish and undergird our world. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams