Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees

Basic Books, 2022; Picador UK, 2023

The epic story of the planet’s oldest trees and the making of the modern world

Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora, our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the Industrial Revolution.

Taking us from Lebanon to New Zealand to California, Farmer surveys the complex history of the world’s oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.

Starred reviews in Booklist, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly

Trees in Paradise: A California History

W. W. Norton, 2013; reprint from Heyday Books, 2017

Readers of John McPhee will enjoy this brilliant landscape history of California from the Gold Rush to the present.

Brown was the dominant hue of California, a largely treeless landscape in the 1850s. American settlers quickly began to “improve” the scene, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities. A century later eucalypts defined the look of lowland California; profitable citrus colonies dominated the Southland; and graceful palms spoke of Los Angeles style. Meanwhile, the old-growth redwood forests of the North Coast became infrastructure, transformed by the saw teeth of American enterprise.

This new landscape was no paradise: eucalypts exploded in fire; orange groves froze on cold nights; palms harbored rats and dropped heavy fronds on streets below. Disease, infestation, and sprawl all spelled decline for these nonnative evergreens. In the north, however, a new forest of second-growth redwood took root, nurtured by public and private action. In this dazzling account, history and nature combine to yield a rich new perspective on the Golden State.

On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape

Harvard University Press, 2008

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no “Indian” legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it—once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zion’s Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself “native” in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment—how they create homelands.

Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense—an endemic spiritual geography. They called it “Zion.” Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as “Lamanites,” or spiritual kin. On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning.

This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed “Indian” place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those places—cultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes.