Linda Herrick picks her New Zealand Book of the Year

New Zealand's Native Trees
by John Dawson and Rob Lucas
(Craig Potton $120)

Dr John Dawson,former associate professor of botany at Victoria University, and photographer Rob Lucas worked together for nearly seven years to produce this magnificent, comprehensive survey of our trees. The result is a lifetime treasure for any household, perhaps for generations beyond.
As Dawson and Lucas say in the preface, ``What we've got is beyond quantifying; it's bigger than all of its parts and bigger than us, too ... we now realise that what we have is not replicated elsewhere in the world - it is truly unique.''
NZ Native Trees carries all the trademarks of a Craig Potton publication: meticulous attention to production details, clear and attractive layout, first-class paper stock. Absolute class in every aspect.
The sequence is straightforward: conifers (10), tree ferns (2), and flowering trees (73), with attached boxes throughout explaining/illustrating associated issues such as cabbage tree decline, ``thieving from a thief'' (a fungal pathogen), epiphytes on tree ferns, and so on.
The authors must have walked hundreds of kilometres as part of their research, visiting the same trees at various stages of the year to capture seasonal changes.
Lucas' images are astonishing in their range, capturing sweeping coastal and inland vistas, then honing in on the most minute details of a tree's form and development, its juvenile and adult leaves, its buds, flowers, seeds. He has frozen the moment when a tui takes nectar from a kakabeak (Clianthus maximus), thereby pollinating the flower; a monarch butterfly glutting on lacebark flowers; a perfectly camouflaged cabbage tree moth resting on a dead cabbage tree leaf.
And Dawson's text is engaging, crisp and descriptive, supplemented by essays by a handful of authorities and ecologists.
At just over 550 pages, it's a book for dipping and dreaming. 
Craig Potton managing director and publisher Jane Connor, who nurtured the enterprise, asks in her preface: ``Immersed over several years in what sometimes seemed like interminable detail, I often asked myself: `Why do we need to know all this?'; `Why does it matter?'
``It matters because the astonishing biodiversity that all this detail expresses is unique and priceless.'' This book is a document which helps us understand what we've got, and that may help us protect what is under threat.
Linda herrick


Footnote:
Linda Herrick is the Books & Arts Editor at the New Zealand Herald and last Saturday in the Herald's splendid Canvas magazine she devoted 10 pages to book gift ideas for all ages and tastes selected by her and some of her regular reviewers. It was an excellent piece which must have taken a lot of pulling together. I especially admire her courage in going out on a limb and selecting her NZ Book of the Year. I agree with her assessment, it is a very fine piece of publishing and I predict with confidence that it will feature in next year's NZ Post Book Awards.