Nick and Mimi are just two of nine characters spread across the country, all survivors in one way or another (shot down from a plane in Vietnam, electrocuted, paralyzed after falling from a tree) with completely separate, fully realized stories, and it’s astonishing to watch the way trees bring them together. Mimi Ma’s childhood tree is the mulberry planted by her immigrant father in their Wheaton, Illinois backyard, “the Tree of Renewal, the tree at the universe’s center, the hollow tree housing the sacred Tao.” In this language you can hear the author’s reverence for trees, one of the many reasons I adored this book. By the time Nick is born, it has become a landmark sentinel in the prairie, its growth improbably recorded in a series of monthly photographs taken by generations of Hoel men.

Readers meet that tree as a nut gathered by a young Norwegian on Prospect Hill in Brooklyn in the 1850s and carried across the country when Jorgen Hoel and his bride move west to homestead. For him it’s the chestnut on his grandparents’ farm in Iowa. It could-and should-become a foundational “tree lit” text, a touchstone for those who would camp at the Fairy Creek blockade, or elsewhere on the frontlines of the battle to save our remaining stands of old growth trees.Nicholas Hoel, a character in The Overstory by Richard Powers, also grows up with a special tree. The result may be a polemic, but it is a persuasive and engaging one. Powers weaves tree facts-and history, and science-into the narrative of The Overstory. The stories of its characters are told through their relationships with trees: Nicholas Hoel’s great-great-great-grandfather plants a chestnut tree on an isolated homestead in Iowa, thus preserving it-for a while, at least-from the blight which destroys the vast chestnut forests farther east Mimi Ma’s father plants a mulberry tree in his back yard in California to honor his father and the silk industry, through which the family made their fortune back in China before his emigration Watchman and Maidenhair spend more than a year suspended in the branches of a giant redwood named Mimas, hoping to save it (and others) from being logged.

What makes The Overstory unconventional-and fascinating-is that it is essentially a work of natural history in novel form. The Overstory is, in many ways, a fairly conventional multi-generational saga, telling the stories of nine Americans and their descendants over a period of about 150 years. Printed on the back of the title page of Richard Powers’s The Overstory (Vintage) is a note stating that “by using recycled paper in place of paper made with 100 percent virgin fiber, the paperback first printing has saved: 169 trees, 13,000 gallons of water, 73,200 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, 580 pounds of solid waste.” That’s a lot of grateful trees.

The overstory nicholas hoel