What Trees Remember by Marie HruškováMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Too bad there isn't a book cover image, as it really is a nice drawing. The cover is pulled from one of the drawings in the book. This seems to be a bit of an obscure book.
This is a short book (easily read in a day, about an hour or so) about 30 important trees across the Czech Republic. Each entry has an illustration drawn by Jaroslav Turek. The associated essay about the particular tree tells the history of why this particular tree is important for the Czech country. Some are fables, but many more are associated with an important person. The trees are mainly oak, linden or pine.
One amazing fact was there were several times when a story mentions how the tree was planted upside down, crown first, and if it continue to grow then it proved something, such as a person’s innocence or where to build a church.
All of the trees discussed are old, ancient trees. Many of them have been helped by the local villagers across the years to continue the tree’s survival, such as banding the trunk, shoring up the branches, and in several cases placing a roof type structure over exposed hollows from broken off branches. And only one mentioned was no longer living by the time of publication, after a very long life.
The last portion of the book has a very short biography of each of the person’s mentioned and of the area where each tree is located. Makes this book feel a bit more of a history book than just a tree survey.
The book came from my continuing a deep dive into my shelves, as I bought in Prague on my second visit there over twenty years ago now. I bought this book as a type of a souvenir for the area. The paper is also very nice and the book is lovely. Not sure why it took me so long to finally read this. Maybe it just mostly got overlooked.
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