Meeting one tree collector is interesting. Finding out about a second tree collector is intriguing. Learning about a third tree collector? 

If you’re Amy Stewart and you write about the natural world, that’s the impetus for a book. 

The Portland author and artist’s latest nonfiction book, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession, publishes July 16. It dives deep into the world of dendrophiles, including one in Oregon. Like the objects of their desire, tree collectors vary widely. Stewart classifies them into species: healers, ecologists, artists, curators, educators, community builders, enthusiasts, seekers, preservationists, and visionaries. Her book features 50 short profiles, all with watercolor and colored pencil portraits that she made from photographs.

Stewart met her first collector at an event where he mentioned to her that he collected trees. “I just thought that was such a weird thing to collect,” she said. “They’re very large and they’re hard to move and, like, how does that even work?” 

She found out about her second collector when she sold a watercolor of palm trees in San Diego. The buyer wrote back that he knew the exact spot she’d painted: His husband collected palm trees. 

She learned about her third collector when onetime U.S. poet laureate W.S. Merwin died in 2019 at his home in Hawaii. Stewart read in an obituary that Merwin had spent decades cultivating a palm tree collection. It features more than 2,740 trees representing more than 400 species, according to the Merwin Conservancy website. 

“So suddenly, I had this little list, right?” Stewart said. She began, well, collecting people who collect trees. 

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The Tree Collectors is Stewart’s latest book about the natural world. Her first was From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden, a 2001 memoir about the garden she and her husband planted in Santa Cruz, Calif. Since then, she’s written about the ecosystem beneath us (The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms), the floral industry (Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers), hostile flora and fauna (Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities and Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects) and the botany of booze (The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks). She’s also the author of a historical fiction series, the Kopp Sisters novels, based on the real-life exploits of a World War I-era female deputy sheriff.

For The Tree Collectors, Stewart went where her subjects hung out: The Maple Society, the International Camellia Society, the International Oak Society. She combed through videos on YouTube and TikTok. She looked in particular for people who lived outside the U.S. and Europe. She sought women and people of color. 

“I was really interested,” she said, “in finding people who collected in sort of unexpected and alternative ways, other than just, ‘I am a rich person with a large estate that I have filled with magnificent trees’ – like, what else is there?”   

As she made connections and did interviews, she found people whose collections were not only unusual but also intensely personal. “I wasn’t expecting this book to be so emotional and so heartfelt,” she said. “I would just be kind of wrung out at the end of some of these conversations, and also feel like I just made a new best friend.”

Those new friends include Vivian Keh, a playwright in San Jose, Calif., whose collection centers on persimmons, a tree significant to her Korean heritage. They include Linda Miles, an Englishwoman whose collection consists of trees planted to memorialize occasions, milestones, and loved ones for family members, friends, and neighbors. They include Mike Gibson, an artist in South Carolina whose collection is the topiaries he tends and creates. 

Stewart also writes about Helton Josué Teodoro Muniz of Brazil, who cultivates 1,300 species of Brazilian fruit trees. She writes about Reagan Wytsalucy of Utah, who is restoring peach orchards that once were central to Navajo life in New Mexico and Arizona. She writes about Alemayehu Wassie Eshete of Ethiopia, who works to preserve church forests, all that remain of his country’s once-lush canopy. She writes about collectors who don’t own a single tree; they gather wood samples or seeds or pine cones or leaves. Some collect by mapping the trees of London or New York City or Mexico City. 

Representing Oregon in the book is Joanie Cooper of Molalla, whom Stewart labels “The Apple Preservationist.” Cooper oversees the Temperate Orchard Conservancy, which safeguards more than 4,500 apple trees with the goal of preserving and sharing their genetic diversity.

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“She was referred to me by other apple detectives, so to speak,” Stewart said. “She has such an interesting story. First of all, the idea that here, just outside of Portland, we had what might be the world’s largest apple collection. And second of all, that the only way to save it really was to clone the entire thing. … It’s this massive undertaking, and they’re just out there kind of chugging away with their group of volunteers and figuring it out and making it happen.”

Stewart hopes readers see The Tree Collectors as a book about people whose lives have been changed by their relationship with trees. For her, digging into the world of tree collectors has sparked an interest in looking at trees individually. “A lot of us tend to think of trees in a broader, more generic way,” she said. “We like hawthorne trees. But, well, what about that hawthorne tree? What do you think of that one as opposed to that one? … Which one do I have a connection to? Which one is my favorite? Which one do I have an opinion about?”

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Amy Stewart will appear at 7 p.m. Aug. 12 at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St., Portland, in an event co-sponsored with Hoyt Arboretum. At 10:30 a.m. Aug. 24, she will lead a Tree Collectors Walk and Talk at Hoyt Arboretum, 4000 S.W. Fairview Blvd., Portland. Fee is $25 members and $30 nonmembers, and pre-registration is required.