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Science, Wisdom, History, and America's Black Botanical Legacy
by Beronda L. Montgomery
How the Word Is Passed meets Braiding Sweetgrass in a cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery, shared through the stories of long-lived trees.
The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.
In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the way seven trees―as well as the cotton shrub―are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.
"A poignant and singular retelling of Black American history." —Publishers Weekly
"Botanical knowledge, Montgomery argues persuasively, was intrinsic to Black people's survival and sustenance before and after emancipation. A fresh perspective on Black history." —Kirkus Reviews
"We have been waiting for this. A botanical memoir, a history, a history with a Black lens―that takes us from roots to branches giving us the keys to an alternative retelling of the American landscape and the ways plants mark who we are and where we've been. This is an electric, bold weaving of ethnobotany, personal memoir, spirit and science and I am here for it." ―Michael W. Twitty, award-winning author of The Cooking Gene and Koshersoul
"Absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in the convergences of human and plant lives. Full of joy, sorrow, and brilliant insight, this book forever changed how I think about trees and American ecology and history. Black botanical legacies, and their vitally important roles in culture and ecology today, are vividly evoked in this extraordinary weave of biology, history, and memoir." ―David George Haskell, biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-finalist for The Forest Unseen and Sounds Wild and Broken
This information about When Trees Testify was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Beronda L. Montgomery is an award-winning plant biologist and author of the acclaimed Lessons from Plants (Harvard University Press, 2021). She has been named one of the journal Cell's 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America, and was awarded the 2021 Cynthia Westcott Science Writing Award and 2022 Adolph E. Gude, Jr. Award for outstanding service to the science of plant biology. She was named a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University (2025-26), and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Plant Biologists, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the American Academy of Microbiology.
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