The New Sylva - A Discourse of Forest and Orchard Trees for the Twenty-First Century

"Beautiful, useful, inspirational" BBC Wildlife Book of the Month"A delight on every page" Evening StandardIn 1664, the horticulturist and diarist John Evelyn wrote Sylva, the first comprehensive study of British trees. It was also the world''s earliest forestry book, and the first book ever published by the Royal Society. Evelyn''s elegant prose has a lot to tell us today, but the world has changed dramatically since his day. Now authors Gabriel Hemery and Sarah Simblet, taking inspiration from the original work, have masterfully created a contemporary version - The New Sylva. The result is a fabulous resource that describes all of the most important species of tree that populate our landscape.Silvologist Gabriel Hemery explains what trees really mean to us culturally, environmentally and economically in the first part of the book. These chapters are followed by forty-four detailed tree portrait sections that describe the history and th