Man and his trees

British Jonathan Drory made a career on the Air Force - he shot fifty documentaries about science, new technologies and nature. In 2018, Drory released a book with an enticing name "Around the World for 80 trees." The book is made up of eighty small, to a turn or two, stories about trees and all kinds of tree -like plants. Stories are selflessly grouped by regions: Europe, Mediterranean, Africa.

At first glance, the book resembles the usual encyclopedia with which shops are full of and where hundreds of catchy facts are poured into a pile. The main problem of such encyclopedias is in the absence of any ideas and thoughts. The whole text here consists of entertaining information, and you quickly lose interest in it, the facts merge into a continuous faceless mass of the “most-smoker”. Such encyclopedias are superficial and empty, to read them as exciting as the greater Soviet encyclopedia. One friend well called them "random facts for a cocktail party."

Drry managed to avoid the temptation to fill the reader with incredible facts about the trees. And his sense of proportion determined the quality of the book.

Drory tried to show each tree through one story, usually associated with a person. Actually, there are few botanists in the book, the author is more occupied by the interaction of trees and humans: the use of trees in medicine, cooking, their influence on history, mythology, and economics. There are trees that influenced the fate of entire peoples, changed the economies of countries, are covered with superstitions.

Botanika Drouri hardly concerns, although a good annotated list of literature, as well as Drouri membership in different botanical institutions, show that it is familiar with biology firsthand. She just interests him much less than the relations of trees and people.

Some stories suddenly highlight the use of trees. Here is one of the indicative. A hundred years ago, some Japanese monks tried to achieve enlightenment with the help of self -torture. They sat on a hard diet of seeds, nuts, bark and drank infusion of flour tree juice. Their bodies were gradually mummified, the monks were dying of dehydration, but thanks to the varnish, the body did not decompose. Three years after his death, the grave was opened, and if the corpse did not decompose, it was believed that the monk had reached enlightenment.

There are not too many such stories in the book. They are painted with a picture, even cinematic. The book in places resembles a good film.

The style is emphasized by unusual restrained illustrations that rhyme well with the text. Almost all of them are made in two colors: green and brown, even half -tones are few. Rare guests are red and blue. And others, it seems, is not at all.

The illustrations have no prospects, and they look like collages: all the drawn lies lies in the same plane, like trees and landscapes were dried like a herbarium.

In the wake of the success of the book, the author with an illustrator four years later released a sequel. It is already dedicated not only to trees (for some reason the magnificent ginkgo in the first book came here), but also to grass and even algae. Alas, the second book is noticeably weaker than the first and resembles the notorious encyclopedias. Her stories are too filled with catchy facts. Etymology, cooking, folklore, children's games can be compacted in one small chapter. The sense of proportion seems to have left the author.

In artistic terms, she also loses the first. The verified laconic of “eighty trees” was replaced by unnecessary descriptions of the appearance of the plants (which are already painted on the next page), empty epithets are found in abundance: all kinds of “serenely beautiful” and “captivating beautiful”. The book has become more boring and banal.

The author failed to repeat the style and effect of the first book, although the illustrator was fully resisted at the same level: the drawings in the second book are still impeccable and stylish.

Anton Nelikhov