Reading the Forested Landscape is a bit like a cross of The Diversity of Life and Sherlock Holmes. Like The Diversity of Life it’s broad and encompasses so much, but it’s also a bit like mystery novel where the crimes often include who killed the trees. At times the book could be easy to read and others a little tedious because it was so involved. So is Sherlock Holmes (and most non-fiction). If you really want to learn something deeply, you need all those details.

Normally when you read about an ecosystem, the book starts with something general and likely old, maybe past climates or bedrock, maybe glaciers, but definitely something encompassing. Then it narrows down to how that impacts the ecosystem we see, the soil layers, the vegetation, the primary consumers, and so on. This book reverses that. What do you know about the soil based on the trees you see? He takes it another step further. Based on the trees you see, what do you know about the previous trees (that are now dead)? Does that random stone wall in the woods tell you what kind of food was grown there a hundred years ago? It does. If you think you know a lot, you’ll probably read this and realize you don’t know nearly as much as you thought. It’s one thing to read a book about crows and say “well, of course I don’t know a lot about crows, I never studied them.” However, Tom Wessels covers so many topics that I was happy with the rare chance to already know an item here or there. I don’t know how much research he had to do when he wrote this book, but when I met him in real life, he certainly knew his stuff like the back of his hand.

Read this book if you want a new look at landscape-sized topics and tire of the same old style of text. You’ll learn a lot, not what you expect, and the artwork is quite nice.