Redwoods

Richard Preston’s work of narrative nonfiction transported me to a place rarely seen by humans. Invisible from the ground, in the canopy of giant redwoods, exists a forest within a forest. Until recently the canopy was thought to be desert like, but thanks to the ecologists, botanists and naturalists depicted in Wild Trees, we now know, in the criss-crossed branches and burned out voids, the redwood nourishes many forms of life -- smaller trees and ferns grow in collected pockets of earth, a rainbow of lichen drip from the trunks and branches, and a particular type of salamander spends its