As collectibles go, trees break the mold — and not just because they don’t fit on a shelf or require periodic dusting.
It didn’t even compute, really, the first time Amy Stewart heard someone say they collected trees about a decade ago. But when she heard the same claim in subsequent years, from people who weren’t affiliated with arboretums or nurseries, she knew she needed to investigate.
What resulted is her latest book, “The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession,” and a newfound understanding that trees are distinguished from other collectibles by their power to transform those who collect them.
When you collect trees — rather than dolls or ceramics or some other form of memorabilia — the element of time enters the equation.
“Everyone who puts a tree in the ground understands that that tree is probably going to outlive them,” she said. “It puts people in touch with their own mortality, but also with this sense that life continues on, and that you can do something positive for the future. Trees come with hope preinstalled.”
That hope manifested in diverse ways among the 50 collectors profiled in “The Tree Collectors,” which is not Ms. Stewart’s first alternative take on a botanical topic. “The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks” became a New York Times best seller in 2013, as did “Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities” in 2009.
When Trees Become Family
Before she started on the new book, Ms. Stewart said, she recalls thinking, “‘Oh, the trees, aren’t they great?’— the trees, plural.”
She added: “But this made me start noticing individual trees. That’s what collectors do, right? They’re like, ‘Which one do you really want?’ One is not the same as another, and so that’s a collector’s mind-set.”
And it takes only one: That’s how any collection begins, with the first acquisition.
Marie Noelle Bouvet, a veterinarian in Ipswich, England, acquired her first tree quite by accident. A potted seedling Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), it was left behind by the previous tenant of an apartment she and her husband rented. The baby tree moved with them after that, until they finally landed at a place with a small piece of land where they could plant it. There, it gradually became part of a group of 50 maples she acquired, one by one. Today, they have a larger property, and her collection of trees numbers 4,000.
But for Ms. Bouvet, it’s not about the tally, as if she who has the most maples wins. She has found that the real reward is in the privilege of nurturing the trees, starting with that first abandoned one, a process she credits with helping her work through the sense of loss she had because she and her husband were unable to have children.
“The trees have become kind of a family to me,” she told Ms. Stewart, noting that they “filled a void.”
She hopes to someday name an Acer palmatum variety from a seedling offspring from her collection, one that displays distinctive characteristics warranting it. “I keep sowing the seeds and looking for one that will be spectacular,” she told Ms. Stewart. “I think about what I would name it. I’ve not been able to give a name to a baby. I would like to name a tree.”
Connecting with Cultural Heritage
Other collectors have found that their trees take them on a journey through their lineage and cultural history.
In her quarter-acre yard in San Jose, Calif., Vivian Keh grows 50 fruit trees, but persimmons are the focus, “a sort of spiritual force in her home orchard,” as Ms. Stewart put it.
When Ms. Keh was a drama student at Yale, she wrote “Persimmons in Winter,” a play based on her Korean ancestors’ experiences during and after the Korean War, and “the connection between persimmons and getting through hard times,” Ms. Stewart said.
The fruits are a Buddhist symbol of transformation, used in ceremonies and to honor the dead. And the traditional Asian type (Diospyros kaki) that would have been familiar to Ms. Keh’s ancestors ripened in winter, providing welcome off-season sweetness. She may not know every detail of those difficult war years, but she knows that persimmons were, and are, a bright spot. So each winter, she boxes up the fruit from her harvest to send to her mother and other relatives.
“Being a child of immigrants, relationships can get complicated,” she told Ms. Stewart. “One way I can offer a gesture of love is by giving my elders these fruits that they adore. It keeps me connected to them.”
In Search of Navajo Peaches
Reagan Wytsalucy, an extension assistant professor for Utah State University, is of Navajo descent, something she began to explore more deeply while working on her master’s thesis.
Her father suggested the subject, she told Ms. Stewart: to look into the story of the Navajo peach trees, a form of Prunus persica that produces white-fleshed fruit that is smaller than today’s commercial varieties. These peaches were a traditional crop of Indigenous people in the Southwest, including parts of what is now Arizona, as well as New Mexico, where she grew up.
In the 1860s, thousands of Navajo people were forced off their homelands by the U.S. Army, marched in the notorious Long Walk to internment camps hundreds of miles away, in eastern New Mexico. Villages were intentionally erased, along with the many peach orchards in the Canyon de Chelly region of eastern Arizona, “to destroy their way of life and to make sure they had nothing to come back to,” Ms. Stewart said.
Ms. Wytsalucy continues to seek out the traditional peaches, and their stories. Along the way she has learned of an ancestor who stayed behind, hiding out to help maintain the few remaining peach trees and livestock, “so that people would have something to come back to — and they did eventually come back,” Ms. Stewart said.
This particular tree collection has taken the form of a test orchard in Utah, planted from seeds of the heirloom trees, allowing Ms. Wytsalucy to study their traits and performance while imagining a culturally appropriate way they might possibly be reintroduced one day.
A Tree Farm to Support His Heirs
In Green Pond, S.C., Joe Hamilton’s tree collection stands on what was once heirs’ property: family land that wasn’t passed down with legally binding documentation, like a will.
In a case like this, the heirs may be living on the land and paying the taxes, but the title is not clearly any one person’s, “so they’re in this difficult position of not technically owning it,” Ms. Stewart said. Heirs’ property is familiar to many descendants of formerly enslaved people who came into some land at the end of the Civil War, including Mr. Hamilton’s great-grandfather, she added.
Mr. Hamilton was determined to resolve the matter, and did after years of work. Today, on 44 secure acres, he grows loblolly pines (Pinus taeda), a Southeast native used for telephone poles and lumber. His trees are intended to be a more sustainable wood source than timber harvested from forested areas.
“He’s the only ‘tree collector’ in the book who’s cutting his trees down,” Ms. Stewart said. “But it’s a long-term timber-harvest plan taking place over generations. And he’s thinking about it in terms of creating generational wealth” — for his children and beyond.
Pocket Forests, and a Collection Grafted Onto a Single Tree
While many tree collectors have plenty of land, acreage is not necessarily a requirement.
Shubhendu Sharma’s backyard in Uttarakhand, India, is a tiny forest that he planted from seedlings, after deeply cultivating the soil and inoculating it with microbes. Mr. Sharma, a former Toyota engineer, learned the technique from the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who created a Miyawaki forest, as these pocket forests are known, at Toyota’s campus in Bengaluru, or Bangalore. Mr. Sharma was inspired to make it his life’s work, and he founded a company that plants native forests on various scales.
A tree collection could even emanate from a single trunk. Sam Van Aken, an artist in Syracuse, N.Y., creates living conceptual pieces like “The Tree of 40 Fruit,” which has 40 stone fruit varieties grafted onto one plum, yielding a many-colored spectacle at bloom time.
As for Ms. Stewart, she does not collect trees. But if she did?
“Super-weird conifers” might be her focus, she imagines. She and her husband (a rare book dealer, which makes him a collector in his own right) live in an apartment in Portland, Ore., in “a neighborhood that has an incredible tree canopy,” she said. She is a self-described “big walker,” who is “in the forest pretty much every day,” enjoying nearby Forest Park and Washington Park.
Besides trees’ potential life span, what strikes her most is their scale, as the largest creatures we live alongside.
“You’re lucky if you even get to see a whale, but I can walk up to a 200-year-old Douglas fir and hug it any day of the week,” she said. “And I often do.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A Way to Garden, and a book of the same name.
If you have a gardening question, email it to Margaret Roach at gardenqanda@nytimes.com, and she may address it in a future column.