A book cover with a tree on it

Thoreau and the Language of Trees, Richard Higgins, 2017 

How appropriate to finish this book on the 200th anniversary of Thoreau’s birth!  Higgins, a Concord editor and long time writer for the Boston Globe, has combined brief essays with extensive quotations from Thoreau’s Journal as well as quotes from The Maine Woods, Walden, Autumnal Tints, and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, with his own photographs of modern Concord and classical photographs of Concord by Herbert Wendell Gleason to create a lovely book focused entirely on Thoreau’s deep love and mystical attachment to trees.  His favorite white pines, the stately elms that lined Concord’s streets, and the might oaks which grew in a forest of old growth trees in Boxboro along with observations on winter’s snows and the maritime aspects of forests are Higgins’ chapter topics.  A fine addition to the 200th anniversary flood of Thoreau books.