Down-to-earth tree doctor tells all
You could spend the next few years driving from nursery to nursery, peppering the plant folks with probing questions about trees and shrubs. You could park yourself deep in the woods, absorbing all you could about species after species.
You would still come up short, compared with what's packed into Michael A. Dirr's definitive masterwork, "Dirr's Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs" (Timber Press, $79.95).
If your aim is to become fluent in all things woody, here's the more enlightening road to becoming a walking, talking wizard on roughly 3,700 species and cultivars of trees and shrubs: Hoist the nearly 7-pound encyclopedia off the shelf, grab yourself a pen for note-taking and start turning the nearly 1,000 pages.
For all his ironclad horticultural knowledge, Dirr is one of those rare professors who know how to spin a yarn, whose passion for his trees is downright catching, and who never ceases to pull fascinating facts out of his pocket. Chicago Tribune
