Here's part of what Amazon says about Richard Preston's The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Richard Preston, best known for The Hot Zone, the terrifying tale of the Ebola virus, is a science writer with an uncommon gift for turning complex biology into riveting page-turners. In The Wild Trees, he hoists himself into a gentler subject: old-growth forests, mostly redwoods, that have managed to evade the timber industry's blades and still live along the coast of northern California. Preston assures us that, amazingly, until the past two decades the ecosystem formed by the intertwining limbs of these ancient, gargantuan living things had never really been studied. Preston introduces us to several researchers, most prominently botanist Stephen C. Sillett, who are probing the mysteries of the skyscraper-high forest canopy. In addition to Sillett, there's Michael Taylor, a millionaire's son and speed-chess champion who is afraid of heights but downsizes his life to work as a grocery clerk while he searches for the world's tallest tree, and Marie Antoine, who at the age of 8 lost her mother to cancer and became a scholar of lichens. Eventually, Preston, who took up tree-climbing as a respite from writing, joins them up in the treetops.
[snip]
Like the forest canopy itself, The Wild Trees is a tangled but rewarding labyrinth. There's the story of the climber who professionally shouts "Headache," the signal for a falling object, as he tumbles from a branch nearly 100 feet off the ground. And of Sillett, whose first girlfriend leaves him because he is so preoccupied with redwoods. He breaks down sobbing as he reveals his despair to Taylor. Then Sillett meets Antoine; they consummate their union in an acrobatic act of treetop lovemaking and later have a wedding aloft with everyone, including the minister, roped and harnessed.
And here's part of an excerpt posted at Cool Tools:
Lowman used a Magic Marker to write numbers on the leaves of some Australian trees, and then she climbed up into the trees every so often to see how many numbered leaves were still hanging there. "I'm from upstate New York, and I figured maybe six months, and then the leaf would fall off," she said. Nineteen years later, entering middle age, Lowman found leaves with Magic Marker numbers on them that she had written on the leaves as a younger woman. The leaves had remained alive and unchanged for almost two decades. This illustrates the difficulty humans can have in seeing what's happening in a forest canopy.
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
