William Bryant Logan’s Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees takes the reader on a tour de force from the streets and landfills of New York City, to the secluded hills of Etxarri-Aranatz in Navarre, Spain, and beyond. We are introduced to Basque axmen, Japanese foresters, Karuk basketmakers, and British hedge layers. Spirits, demons and Profits come forward from a journey intertwined with ancient forests and medieval cultures. In his stories, we ride along while Logan whimsically searches for-and ultimately finds- the traditions between people and trees across millennia.

Against the backdrop of his own arboriculture experiments, experiences and current projects, Logan looks to history for his guidance on caring for trees, and through a world tour of conversations with people and cultures that are woven tightly with the lives of trees, Sprout Lands shows us the real gift of trees lies in the conversations we have with them.

The reader pushes forward through each chapter as a sprout rises from a bud or soil aiming towards the sun, and we grow on further fed by an underlying mystical suggestion that trees indeed have an undoubtable spirit of immortality.

William Bryant Logan writes, “Life in this sense is a kind of shimmering, where you see the uniqueness of an organism at one moment and its ramified countlessness on the other. In the starlight of this thought, you begin to glimpse another view of ever more.” (Logan, 291).

As an arborist reading Sprout Lands, I can’t help but to feel so deeply connected to the history trees are rooted in. Logan reveals that the reflected in the diversity of trees all over the world are the complex ecosystems that they sustain, held together by the ancient practice of cutting and regrowth. By pruning, planting, burning and even neglecting trees, William Logan Bryant shows us that trees themselves are by far the best teachers, and if we can just learn to listen to them a little more, they will indeed be a guiding light for the future.