The Language of Trees: How Trees Make Our World, Change Our Minds and Rewild Our Lives

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The Language of Trees is a gorgeously illustrated homage to the hidden wonders of the forest and our indelible connection to trees, filled with prose, poetry and art from over fifty collaborators, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, Elizabeth Kolbert, Amitav Ghosh, Richard Powers, Suzanne Simard, Gaia Vince, Tacita Dean, Kerri n Dochartaigh & Robin Wall Kimmerer.

In this deeply thoughtful collection, artist Katie Holten gifts readers her visual Tree Alphabet made of the trees themselves and uses it to masterfully translate and illustrate these pieces from some of the worlds most exciting writers and artists, activists and ecologists.

Holten guides us on a journey from prehistoric cave paintings and creation myths to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to the language of fossil poetry. In doing so, she unearths a new way of seeing the natural beauty that surrounds us and creates an urgent reminder of what could happen if we allow it to slip away.

The Language of Trees is an astonishing fusion of storytelling, knowledge and art that reveals how these living, feeling, communicating beings make our world, change our minds and rewild our lives.

Immersive, celebratory and timely all beautifully illustrated by Holten.Observer.

Reviews

A hit far beyond these shores, this compendium sparked something of a movement with its ingenious, affection-laden tree alphabet. Irish Independent, Books of the Year 2023

A thing of beautyvisually and cerebrally immersive. Sunday Independent

immersive, celebratory and timely beautifully illustrated by Holten The Observer

A masterpiece Max Porter

AA visual reminder that, like strong oaks from little acorns, we still can create the world in which we wish to live.Kerri n Dochartaigh

A thoughtful and incisive view of Nature across the globe. The Countryman

One of the most inspired items of environmental literature in recent years. Irish Independent

an exceptional compendium of arboreal art, prose and poetry. In exploring what could be a weighty issue in the current climate emergency, the tone is awe, not doom A forest of writing to be cherished Irish Times

Author Bio

Katie Holten is an artist and activist, born in Ireland and now mainly living in the USA. In 2003, she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane. Her drawings investigate the tangled relationships between humans and the natural world. She has created Tree Alphabets, a Stone Alphabet, and a Wildflower Alphabet to share the joy she finds in her love of the more-than-human world. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and frieze. She is a visiting lecturer at the New School of the Anthropocene. If she could be a tree, she would be an Oak.