The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees
By Douglas W. Tallamy
This guy speaks for bugs and plants, with a gift for reaching people. Fun to read and rooted in entomologist
Doug Tallamy’s powerful mix of ecological research, personal experience and native plant advocacy, his newest
book celebrates the Quercus clan, featuring one White Oak through a year on his Pennsylvania property.
Nature chronicles are a story form I enjoy, like Sue Hubbell’s through-the-seasons Ozark beekeeping narrative, A
Country Year: Living the Questions
. (Yes, I know honeybees are not natives.) Any author I respect and love
prompts me to want to know more about her or him, how place and days shape their perspective.
Nature of Oaks is no semi-memoir, but Tallamy does lace his trove of oak-and-company facts with personal lore.
How his father, like most tidy American yard-keepers, annually raked a wealth of oak leaves into giant piles little
Doug jumped into, then burned that “leaf litter” – and all the nutrients, insect eggs and pupae, and soil
organisms with it. And how patient Tallamy Sr. was tested, setting up a family-sized heavy canvas tent for
extended summer camping, with tiny oak caterpillars parachuting down his neck.
If the January chapter’s urgent Insect Apocalypse percentages make you want to run from reading, skip into
April for the harrowing saga of cynipid oak gall wasps. The brink of disaster is a place all Earth creatures know,
but Tallamy’s way of telling life-and-death as an Earth-normal casts our human destructions in a role with space
for us to change. He plays on our species’ fascination with catastrophe, planting us into Nature’s thrilling dramas
(as turf-and-chemical villains), and giving us options (science based!) to grow redemption for all: birds, insects,
water, soil, us and other animals. In this book, through alliance with mighty Oak trees.
Tallamy’s call to action remains laser-focused: Plant Natives – NOW! This imperative is magnetic, the positive
power in all his books, talks and articles. He details huge issues and simultaneously hands us a totally do-able
way to make a real difference.
I always learn something, get some expert guidance from Doug Tallamy, to improve my efforts at ecological
landscaping. This time around, I feel proud to have three new species of Oaks in our city yard but I realize we
might better have more than one individual of the same species. Though I have loved recommending Tulip
Poplar as a fast-growing, sturdy urban-yard shade native tree, I’m redoubling my efforts to push planting OAKS.
And I’ve grown the habit of visiting and observing them.
Tallamy never shies from giving us hard data, but he gives us great stories too. How Oaks evolved marescence,
the phenomenon of holding leaves on lower branches through winter, in the era when giant wooly mammoths
browsed 20 feet up. How Gypsy Moth, the Destroyer, differs from native moth species and how one human’s
silk-production scheme escaped control, disastrously.
In Nature of Oaks, he does it again with towering ecological lore grounded around one genus of trees. Through
Tallamy’s words, Oaks invite us to partner with their power, to reverse human wreckage and regrow ecological
health.
Contributed by Jean Ponzi, Green Resources Manager, EarthWays Center of the Missouri Botanical Garden