Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton
By Richard Horan (Harper Perennial, 2011)
Reviewed by Renee D'Aoust.
Richard Horan is a man who understands that until the recent advent of eBooks, and after monks stopped using animal skins to make prayer books, our printed books came from trees. In that sense, Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton is dedicated to Horan’s love for “all the trees that have provided the vital wood flesh for millions of magical books throughout the ages.” Horan’s journey collecting actual seeds from famous authors’ trees is an engaging travelogue, homage, and memoir.
The book also celebrates a country that produced writers as diverse as Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty, and Rachel Carson. For an example of this breadth, Horan writes, “To go from the gnarly, opiate-addicted, avant-garde, nonlinear Beat novelist [William S. Burroughs] to the sweet, genteel, beloved, domestic aunty of the short story [Eudora Welty] is a long and winding road.” Horan admits, “But of the two, my heart belongs to Eudora.” Mine, too!
Quotes about trees from famous authors are priceless gems dotted as section breaks throughout Seeds such as this one from Willa Cather: “I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.” And my favorite from Kate Chopin:
“I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches. Have you ever heard the earth breathe?”
Accompanied by a beautiful sketch, in each chapter Horan lists the popular species name (and the Latin name, too) associated with each author. Under the conservationist Rachel Carson appears: “tulip poplar, northern catalpa, and black cherry.” Horan writes, “It took Rachel Carson, a marine biologist from [a] tiny town in Pennsylvania, to point out that the manufacturers of DDT were poisoning the world with increasingly deadlier doses.” Carson’s home is a National Historic Landmark, and the woods where she played as a child are preserved, but Horan finds “the trees themselves… surprisingly misshapen and in ill health. No doubt the mission statement was to leave the little wood in its original state.”
Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton
By Richard Horan (Harper Perennial, 2011)
[A longer version of this book review was first published in the Idaho Forest Owners Association Newsletter.]