My book From Lumberjills to Wooden Wonders is, as its subtitle indicates, a miscellany. I had no plan in mind when I wrote it. Like Topsy, it just grew, over a long period of unhurried years, as I learnt of more and more weird and wonderful facts about the connections between trees and everything else. But looking back at it now, there seem to be some themes which came up more often than others:

• I don’t like cruelty and injustice; see for example the entries Agent Orange, Katyn and Palestine.
• I don’t like the way we unnecessarily mutilate our city trees in Europe; see for example Pruning, topping etc., Small trees, and Urban forests.
• I am not religious but I am interested in religion and its use of tree symbols: see Buddha, Genesis, Jesus Christ, Koran, Noah’s ark, Paradise, Tree of knowledge of good and evil, and so on.

The book is not scientific, systematic, or exhaustive on any one subject. It is just a highly personal selection, somewhat quirky, offbeat, and unusual I hope, written purely for the entertainment of people who are interested in these things.

On the Samples Page I have included some interesting facts from the book to show what it is all about. Also on this website you will find Tree Products and Tree Species, two supplemental chapters with additional interesting facts on those two subjects. The entries in the book itself are generally connections between trees, forests or wood on the one hand, and history, culture, medicine, religion or “anything else” on the other hand; whereas the entries in the two online supplemental chapters are generally free-standing “one-dimensional” facts. The chapter “Tree and Forest Products”, contains alphabetic entries dealing with subjects ranging from Ache apple to Zam-buk. The chapter titled “Other Interesting Tree Species” – i.e. “other” than those dealt with in the book itself — deals with a range of species from Acacia to the Yohimbé tree.

Asterisks and references in the online supplemental chapters refer to entries in those two chapters or in the book.

Mikael Grut