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The Meaning of Trees Book

I am very excited to announce the publication of:
The Meaning of Trees – the history and use of New Zealand’s native plants. 

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When I first began this blog in 2014, I was completing my undergraduate studies in biology at the University of Auckland. In the back of my mind, I had always dreamed of turning the blog into a book, but didn’t know how to make that a reality. I was hopeful that maybe a publisher would happen to stumble across the blog and see the potential.
So when the publisher at Harper Collins NZ sent me a message to say they thought the blog would make a great book, I couldn’t believe it and had to double-check it wasn’t spam! Since then, I’ve been working for the past year or so writing brand new plant articles and updating and improving old posts to be included in the book – along with a history of New Zealand told through the lens of our native plants.

I am incredibly excited to share the book with you all – it’s due out in stores in early May 2019.

There’s a tremendous amount of people that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to for helping making this book a reality, but for now I just wanted to say a huge thank you to every one of you that have read, promoted and supported the blog.

Also – for anyone who is in Auckland, I’ll be speaking about the book and the history and uses of our native plants at The Auckland Writers Festival on Sunday 19th May 2019.
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UPDATE: The Meaning of Trees is now out in stores and can be purchased from Whitcoulls, Paperplus, Unity Books, Mighty Ape, Book Depository and more!
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The response has been absolutely overwhelming, with the book in the Best Selling NZ non-fiction books for 5 weeks straight, and reaching #2 on the charts!

21 thoughts on “The Meaning of Trees Book”

  6. Hello hello, I stumbled across you on Instagram, love what you’re doing!!! Do you have a date for the release of your book? I would love to buy a copy as a gift for someone special whose birthday is coming up.
    I hope the book is a massive success 🙂

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    1. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment Jessie – thats awesome to hear!

      It is out in stores now! You should be able to find it in Whitcoulls or Paper Plus 🙂

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  7. Kia ora

    Where can I purchase the pukapuka please?

    Naku Noa Amiria

    On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 10:42 AM The Meaning of Trees wrote:

    > meaningoftrees posted: “I am very excited to announce the publication of: > The Meaning of Trees – the history and use of New Zealand’s native plants. > When I first began this blog in 2014, I was completing my undergraduate > studies in biology at the University of Auckland. In t” >

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  8. Robert … We love your book thank you. It is beautifully presented and you are wonderfully knowledgeable and insightful about trees. We have created a very large native garden if you would like to look at it, search for anaturalgarden as one word to see the blog.

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    1. Hi Gillian & Roderick,
      Thank you so much for getting in touch!
      That’s such nice feedback thank you. Your property looks incredible – such a diverse range of natives you have in your garden, its great to see. Amazing that the garden was a paddock with pine trees only 23 years ago – Amazing job!

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  9. Pingback: The Meaning of Trees – Yakanak News

  11. Great book! So informative 🙂
    What percentage of native plants would you estimate are poisonous in some way?
    What percentage would you estimate are deadly?

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    1. Thanks Carol, glad you enjoyed it!
      Good question – hard to say for sure.

      There’s so many native plants that we know very little about. Of the more familiar natives, as a rough guess I’d say maybe five or ten percent are really poisonous that you could do some serious harm. Often certain groups of related plants are poisonous, such as a number of plants in the pea family (e.g. kowhai), anything related to tutu (Coriariaceae) or the tree nettles (Urticaeae). There’s a lot of things that used to be eaten like bracken fern fiddleheads and ngaio berries that were thought to be OK but are now known to be bad for you.

      But that’s just natives – Theres a lot of very poisonous introduced plants and fungi like hemlock or death cap.

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