The Company of Trees: A Year in a Lifetime's Quest - Hardcover

The more you read of the various Earls' attempts to create beautiful views across their parkland, the more you realise they struggle with the same problems the rest of us face when designing our own
little gardens. The only difference is that they're working on a massive scale, and thinking in centuries instead of years ... Raising all his own saplings from seed, he comes across like a real-life version of P. G. Wodehouse's amiable (if unworldly) Lord Emsworth, pottering about with his seed trays and compost in his ancestral kitchen. But he engages fully with the 21st-century threat of global warming, as well as the four new diseases threatening our trees: acute oak decline, sudden oak death, ash dieback and pseudomonas syringae - a lethal canker of horse chestnuts that has infected 49 per cent of the tree species in England, according to a recent survey

(Helen Brown DAILY MAIL)

The Company of Trees: A Year in a Lifetime's Quest, brings readers along a journey from the 1,500 acres of farm and parkland of the family estate at Castlepollard, Co. Westmeath, to planthunting
expeditions in Asia and South America, and more ... told in monthly chapters that will charm a readership beyond those who don't need to Google 'arboretum' for a definition. There is a sense of adventure in travel diary revelations where the energetic Eighth Lord Longford (though he doesn't use that inherited title) tells of shinning up rocky banks near the foothills of the Himalayas and nearly breaking an ankle in the quest for seeds. He being in his 80th year, mind ... Good-humoured revelations of triumphs that sometimes end in failure contribute to an engaging openness

(Valerie Shanley IRISH MAIL ON SUNDAY)

At Tullynally, his estate in Ireland. Thomas Pakenham is growing his own woodland. In this lively diary of his travels to the Himalayas and Patagonia in search of seeds, and his tours of the thriving plantations where he plants and preserves trees, he gives seasoned advice on garden design and landscaping, and worries about the diseases that have devastated ashes, elms, oaks and chestnuts (SAGA magazine)

Historians make very good tree people because they respect both the past, with its particular and changing atmospheres, as well as posterity. After all, most trees span more than one human lifetime, and the story of trees has been part of the story of the land and even the people. And historians can salt the worthy fare of plant descriptions with tales of plant hunters and gardeners from the past. Pakenham's writing is brisk, clear personal and pleasantly epigrammatic ... Readers should finish this book with a lively sense of the importance and allure of trees, even if they have never so much as planted an acorn (Ursula Buchan THE SPECTATOR)

Few have ever indulged their inclinations on a grander scale than Thomas Pakenham, whose passion is for trees. This is an exuberant tale of greed and gratified desire by a romantic who, for 50 years and more, has been planting trees by the thousand on his family estate at Tullynally in Westmeath. Pakenham is currently in his 82nd year, and buying magnolias like a madman "in what the Germans call Torschlusspanik" (last-minute or door-closing panic)... Trees are, as this book points out, "the biggest living things in these islands, taller than most buildings, older than many ancient monuments", and, like the Williamses at Caerhays and the Holfords of Westonbirt, the planting Pakenhams have done them proud in person and in print (Hilary Spurling THE GUARDIAN)

--Guardian

Thomas Pakenham, the champion of trees, narrates a story of exploration and discovery, of life-cycles longer than our own in this lavishly illustrated book ... An enthralling book by a passionate writer, educator and entertainer (WELSH BORDER LIFE) --Welsh Border Life

Thomas Pakenham's endlessly fascinating life and garden is the subject of The Company of Trees in which he continues the story of one man's love for all things arboreal begun in his 2002 bestseller, Meetings with Remarkable Trees. In this latest work we find him at home in Tullynally, where he has established an important arboretum, recalling his diverse personal quests for plants and seeds found on his far-flung travels ... and as all journeys begin with one small step, so do many plants grow from one small seed. Their stories follow fast and furious (David Wheeler HORTUS) --Hortus

Acclaimed historian and bestselling author Thomas Pakenham shares his profound love of trees and reverence for nature, rooted in the family estate of Tullynally in Ireland.