Genius of Trees by Harriet Rix

A mesmerising, mind-expanding global story which shows how trees have learned to use the soil, air, water, plants, fungi, fire, animals and people around them to shape our world – possessing agency beyond anything we might have imagined.

The Genius of Trees tells a mind-expanding global story revealing the inventive and astonishing ways trees learned to shape our natural world.

Over hundreds of millions of years, from prehistoric forests to the trees around us today, we see trees using fire as a reproductive tool, harnessing large mammals to spread their seeds (but poisoning smaller, less useful mammals), and splitting rock to create fertile ground in barren landscapes.

Because trees, we discover, manipulate fundamental elements, plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and even humankind to achieve their ends. From oaks growing in Devon to the laurel rainforests of the Canary Islands and metasequoias in California, from the magnificent sex-shifting oaks of Iraq to the ancient junipers of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border which spin carbon dioxide into rock – trees sculpt their environments.

At once transporting and expert, this profoundly original exploration of the science of trees is a startlingly new way of understanding these glories of our natural world.

The Genius of Trees gives us hope for the future. It enables us to see trees, for the first time, not as victims but as agents of change in a grand ecological narrative – and as leading actors in the great drama of life on earth.

About the Author: Harriet Rix is a tree science consultant and writer. She was formerly based at the Tree Council where she supported Defra in researching tree diseases and urban tree strategies. Before joining the tree sector, she worked in landmine clearance in the Middle East. She acted as scientific advisor on Adrian Grenier’s climate documentary, was secretary of Hedgelink and is trustee of the Iraqi environmental charity Hasar.

Rix holds a biochemistry degree from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. She was a London Library Emerging Writer, and her writing and photography has been published in the Financial Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and more. The Genius of Trees is her first book.

07 Aug 2025
 

The Genius of Trees: How trees mastered the elements and shaped the world by Harriet Rix ISBN 9781847927835