Quick Take
- Narration: Tania Rodrigues brings a conversational warmth that suits the book’s worldly, curious tone, she sounds like someone who actually wants to be telling you this.
- Themes: Trees as cultural and ecological actors, the interplay of human history and plant biology, global botanical curiosity
- Mood: Quietly delightful, like a slow afternoon in a botanical garden with a very well-read companion
- Verdict: Jonathan Drori has written a book of genuine botanical affection that rewards both nature enthusiasts and armchair travelers, unhurried, specific, and full of surprises.
I was halfway through a long flight from Paris to Tokyo when I started Around the World in 80 Trees, and I found myself toggling between the audiobook and the window, looking down at the patchwork below and thinking about what was growing there. That is the effect Jonathan Drori’s book produces: it makes you look differently at the land. By the time I landed, I had added three botanical gardens to my to-visit list and learned more about eucalyptus wood than I ever expected to need.
The Verne reference is knowing rather than labored. Drori follows a loose global itinerary, eighty trees from roughly eighty locations, but the structure is a lightly worn framework rather than a strict itinerary. What connects the entries is not geography but the central argument: that trees are not backdrop. They are actors in human history, in culture, in medicine, in commerce, in language. Every chapter demonstrates this with a specific specimen, from the lime trees of Berlin’s Unter den Linden that intoxicate bees and Germans alike, to the coastal redwoods of California, where the trees’ soaring heights encode a physics lesson about water’s adhesive properties.
Science Worn Lightly, Surprise Delivered Consistently
Drori is a scientist who writes for people who don’t think of themselves as particularly interested in science, and that calibration is precise. He explains the water-tension mechanism behind redwood height in a way that any listener can follow, then immediately delivers the wow moment without making you feel he’s condescending to you. That structure, accessible explanation followed by genuine surprise, repeats throughout the eighty chapters and never becomes formulaic, because the surprises themselves are too varied to predict. Aspirin from willow bark is a fact most people know, but Drori layers context around it, the specific folklore, the chemistry, the debates about dosage, until you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere rather than been reminded of something.
Tania Rodrigues’s narration is well-matched to this material. She has a warmth without being breezy, the quality of someone who finds this interesting and wants you to as well. The book’s range of languages and proper nouns, from botanical Latin to place names across six continents, she handles cleanly. At six hours and nineteen minutes, the audiobook is a pleasantly compact commitment for the scope it covers.
The Cultural Argument Running Beneath the Botany
The most interesting thread in the book, for me as a reader interested in cultural history, is the way Drori consistently shows trees mediating between humans and whatever they most value or fear. India’s sacred banyan tree appears in religious practice, medicine, and colonial history simultaneously. The swankiest streets of nineteenth-century London were paved with Australian eucalyptus wood, imported at great expense and then quietly abandoned when it proved disastrously slippery in rain. That story alone says more about Victorian confidence and its limits than many longer histories.
Drori also engages with environmental stakes without turning the book into an elegy. There are entries where the conservation subtext is unmistakable, where you understand that a particular tree’s range has contracted dramatically or that a traditional use has become economically unviable. But he doesn’t stop to lecture; he lets the facts carry the weight. The effect is that you finish the book concerned in a productive way, with specific knowledge rather than diffuse anxiety.
How Eighty Chapters Stay Fresh
The structural challenge of a book with eighty distinct entries is variation, and Drori navigates it well by rotating his approach. Some entries lead with history, some with biology, some with folklore or culinary use or pharmacology. The banyan and the redwood and the baobab each get a different angle, so that even though you know the shape of each chapter, you don’t know which facet will be the point of entry. The Sydney Morning Herald called it an irresistible mix of science, culture, botany, and history, and that compression is accurate. It genuinely is all four, in every entry, without any of them feeling squeezed out.
Listeners who already know Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees will find the comparison the publisher invites fairly apt, with the note that Drori is rather more global and encyclopedic where Wohlleben is more intimate and forest-centric. They work well as companions. The companion PDF mentioned in the audiobook description includes illustrations that correspond to each entry, and while the audio is entirely self-sufficient, the visual material adds something to the more visually distinctive species.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen if you love nature writing, travel, cultural history, or the kind of book that teaches you things without feeling like a lesson. This works particularly well for morning commutes, walks, and flights. Skip if you’re looking for deep scientific treatment of any individual species, or if the episodic, eighty-chapter structure isn’t your format, some listeners prefer sustained argument over accumulated vignette. Those who love Drori’s breadth should know the depth per entry is genuinely limited by design.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Around the World in 80 Trees better as a physical book or as an audiobook?
Both formats have merit. The audiobook’s six-hour runtime makes it ideal for travel or commuting, and Rodrigues’s narration is engaging enough to hold attention across eighty short entries. However, the companion PDF includes illustrations referenced in the text, which some listeners find adds significantly to the experience. If visual reference matters to you, consider having the PDF available alongside the audio.
Does the book require any botanical knowledge to appreciate?
None at all. Drori is a writer who translates plant science for general audiences, and he explains any technical concept before using it. The book is designed for curious generalists, not botanists or biologists.
How does Drori handle environmental and conservation themes without the book becoming depressing?
He integrates the environmental stakes into the individual stories rather than delivering them as separate warnings. You encounter the implications of habitat loss or overexploitation through specific trees and specific contexts, which produces concern grounded in knowledge rather than diffuse gloom. The book is ultimately celebratory in tone.
Are the eighty entries truly global, or does the book focus heavily on Europe and North America?
The coverage is genuinely global. Drori includes trees from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Central and South America, and the Middle East alongside the European and North American specimens. The variety of cultural contexts is one of the book’s consistent strengths.
