Poetry and Wondrous Facts in The Wisdom of Trees

Author-illustrator Lita Judge (Flight School and Something Beautiful) delivers for children the understanding that Suzanne Simard elevated with her research—forests are more than just a bunch of trees that all happen to be growing in the same place.

The opening poem points the way:

I am a single beech,
but I am not alone.

From left to right, the eye takes in a poem on each spread, against an illustration of a specific forest scene. That could be underground with mycorrhizal fungi in a coastal British Columbia forest, in Central Park, or a Brazilian rain forest, a stand of silver birch in northwest China, with tualang saplings in Malaysia or sugar maples in Vermont—and that’s just a sampler.

A column on the right hand side is filled with enticing information about old trees and young ones, trees that send chemical messages through underground networks, trees that nourish their aging neighbors and those that continue to support the forest long after they themselves are dead.

Each part of the book creates its own trajectory. Some readers might follow the poems from page to page, navigating from one forest community to the next, but the pictures offer a similar journey, as do the narrative prose sections.

Sometimes the voices in the poems are collective:

We will tell you the rest
of our story in a warmer season

At other times they are a single voice, speaking with urgency to a single you:

Neighbor, can you hear me?
There are insects on my leaves.

A tribute song to forests with the underlying message that the “wood wide web” we often take for granted not only extends around the globe but is ceaselessly at work.