Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt

TAKE TO THE TREES

Marguerite Holloway

A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in America's Imperiled Forests

An empowering journey into the overstory with the arborists and forest experts safeguarding our iconic trees.

Journalist Marguerite Holloway arrives at the Women's Tree Climbing Workshop as a novice. Run by twin sister tree doctors Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll, the program helps peoplefrom everyday tree lovers to women arborists working in a largely male industrydevelop remarkable skills and channel their passion for the outdoors. As Holloway tackles unfamiliar equipment and dizzying heights, she tells stories of charismatic trees: hemlock, aspen, Atlantic white cedar, beech, and others. She spotlights experts exploring the ecology of resilience amidst climate-driven plagues of pests and drought. As she climbs and learns about the science of trees, she comes to understand their profound significance in her relationship with her late mother and brother. A gorgeously illustrated story of ecology and personal empowerment, Take to the Trees sounds the alarm about rapid arboreal decline while also offering hope about how we might care for our forests and ourselves.

Marguerite Holloway has written for the New York Times and the New Yorker, among other publications, and is the author of The Measure of Manhattan. She is a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in New York City.

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Book Published 2025-05-13 by W.W. Norton

Comments

"The book in part is a sad tale of the damage we have done, but when Marguerite Holloway herself takes to the trees and learns from those who work with them, she plants the seeds of reconciliation between people and the non-human world. Readers should take the title literally and do likewise."

Powerful and moving, Take to the Trees will resonate with anyone looking for ways to live with optimism and courage through our current era. Just as Holloway literally climbs into trees and finds herself, so too does the book explore the connections between trees and the branches of our lives -- from the visible canopy to the substantive roots.

"In her powerful and affecting book, Marguerite Holloway makes a case for how caretaking trees is really caretaking ourselves, and each other."

Take to the Trees invites us to contemplate pushing past our own limits up into the treetops, as well as respecting the guidance of trees. I learned much from this wise book, and can only hope that many readers follow this writer up into the highest branches, to gain an understanding of where we are planted on this earth. Holloway's insights are urgent and necessary.

Take to the Trees is as lyrical and energetic a book as its title would suggest. In this hybrid of participatory journalism, environmental essay, and family memoir, Marguerite Holloway moves with effortless grace among her literary genres, and in so doing teaches us not only the facts but also the poetry of the natural world. One can't finish this wonderful book without seeing the nonhuman world with new eyes.

Like the trees that it centers, this wonder of a book soars, oxygenates, roots, connects, and awes. It's a paean to all things arboreal, a memoir about loss and community, and a call to engage in acts of caretaking for our trees and for each other. To do any one of these things well would have made for a good book; to do them all beautifully is a true gift.

Nature lovers will dig this. Read more...