The thing I had in Tucson was a field guide this is more of a reference book. “Is the 2021 book under review an improvement on the thing you had in Tucson?” Yes and no. I just received a question from the audience. More, if it happens to be too dark, just now, to identify your tree, you can simply come back later and examine the case in better light. Treewatching is quite a bit easier than birdwatching, for the very excellent reason that trees do not fly away while you are struggling to pull out the field guide. Someone will have planted a tree in their yard that does not occur naturally in this zone. These days, I have this pleasure: I’ll be muddling along on the sidewalk and suddenly I’ll stop dead and say “What are you doing here?”-to a tree.

A masterpiece of user-friendly exposition. (“Wait, this is an olive tree? Where are the olives?” “Wait, trees have flowers?”) The book I had was a National Audubon Society Field Guide: North American Trees-Western Region. I went through all the standard primitive phases of falling in love with trees.

For months, I never went out without that book. The only reason I had seen the campus specimen was because it looked like it had dropped off a spaceship. I had never seen that all those trees were the same species, because, like most people, I did not SEE trees. Because I had learned how to work the tree book, I discovered there were bluegum eucalyptuses all over Tucson. Turned out my tree was a bluegum eucalyptus, native to Australia but planted widely in the American Southwest in the 1850s.

Eventually I bought a tree book and taught myself how to use it. Nobody had a clue what kind of tree it was, and nobody was able to confirm or explode my theory. The tree was so big I conceived the idea that it was perhaps the “University Tree,” planted at the time of the founding of the U of A in the 1850s. In the Arizona heat, the leaves would get very dry and when the wind passed through them, there was a rattling sound, like when wind passes through a Venetian blind. When I was at the University of Arizona, there was a large, strange tree on campus: trunk much, much larger than any normal tree, leaves like a willow’s.

Trees in rhino