In the Company of Trees is a little volume of photos and reflections on trees, a pleasant mixture of science and cultural writing peppered with arboreal quotes — though not, curiously, the classic “I think that I shall never see / a poem as lovely as a tree”. (That verse is partially appropriated for the title of one section, though.) A piece on the life of the strangler fig tree is followed by a history of Christmas trees, for instance, and connected by a bit of German verse hailing the trueness of Tannenbäume. The photos are often gorgeous, and despite having read full-length monographs on trees and forests, I still learned a few things: I’d never heard of the Wollemi evergreen, for instance, an ancient species considered a living fossil and now being actively propagated, nor of fig stranglers. The trees that feature here hail from every part of the globe, including Antarctica, which was once subtropical. This is a coffee-table kind of book, attractive and easy to dip in and out of. Those who want a hardier read would most enjoy Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, one of my favorite science books ever.