The Wild Trees: What If the Last Wilderness is Above Our Heads?

Front Cover
Allen Lane, 2007 - Nature - 294 pages
Hidden in unseen valleys of dense rainforest on the coast of California are the world's tallest and largest things - trees up to forty stories tall and as old as the Parthenon- the coastal redwoods. Mysterious and unexplored, few people know how to find them, and fewer still have climbed them to study their upper reaches and discover the wonders there. The Wild Treesis the astonishing story of the handful of wild tree climbers and amateur naturalists who are now working in the redwood canopy, exploring this enchanted and terrifically dangerous new world. The canopy is a mysterious place filled with hanging gardens of ferns, mosses and lichens, a massive system of aerial trunks that have fused to form walkways, where redwoods begin to grow on other redwoods, 300 feet in the air.

The Wild Treesis a story of high adventure of the small band of friends, colleagues and lovers committed to finding the secrets hidden in the lost world of the tallest trees on earth.

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About the author (2007)

Richard Preston was born in 1954 in Cambridge, Massachusetts and received a Ph.D from Princeton University. He is the author of The Hot Zone; American Steel (about the Nucor Corporation's project to build a revolutionary steel mill); and First Light (about astronomy and astronomists) which won the American Institute of Physics award in science writing. An asteroid has been named 'Preston' in honour of First Light. Preston is a lump of rock the size of lower Manhattan. It is likely some day to collide with Mars or the Earth. Richard Preston is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and has won numerous awards, including the AAAS-Westinghouse Award and the McDermott Award in the Arts from MIT

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