十四年来，贝丝·穆恩坚持不懈地拍摄古树，她的足迹遍布美国、欧洲、亚洲、中东和非洲。她的拍摄对象，有的独自生长，有的长在偏远的山坡、私人庄园或自然保护区；另一些则在文明中保持着傲人的生存状态，尽管它们岌岌可危。然而，所有的树都有一种因岁月而完善的神秘之美，以及将我们与比我们自己更伟大的时间感和自然感联系起来的力量。穆恩在她的照片中表现的正是这种美和这种力量。

这本精美的摄影集以整版双色版的形式展示了穆恩拍摄的近七十幅最好的树木肖像。图中的树木包括生长在英国教堂庭院中的盘根错节、树干空心的紫杉（有的已经有一千多年的历史）；马达加斯加的猴面包树，因其巨大的树干和谦逊的树枝比例奇特失调而被称为 "倒挂树"；以及只有在非洲之角外的索科特拉岛上才会生长的奇幻的龙血树，红艳艳的，呈伞状。

Beth Moon's fourteen-

year quest to photograph ancient trees has taken her across the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Some of her subjects grow in isolation, on remote mountainsides, private estates, or nature preserves; others maintain a proud, though often precarious, existence in the midst of civilization. All, however, share a mysterious beauty perfected by age and the power to connect us to a sense of time and nature much greater than ourselves. It is this beauty, and this power, that Moon captures in her remarkable photographs.

This handsome volume presents nearly seventy of Moon's finest tree portraits as full-page duotone plates. The pictured trees include the tangled, hollow-trunked yews - some more than a thousand years old - that grow in English churchyards; the baobabs of Madagascar, called "upside-down trees" because of the curious disproportion of their giant trunks and modest branches; and the fantastical dragon's-blood trees, red-sapped and umbrella-shaped, that grow only on the island of Socotra, off the Horn of Africa.

Moon's narrative captions describe the natural and cultural history of each individual tree, while Todd Forrest, vice president for horticulture and living collections at The New York Botanical Garden, provides a concise introduction to the biology and preservation of ancient trees. An essay by the critic Steven Brown defines Moon's unique place in a tradition of tree photography extending from William Henry Fox Talbot to Sally Mann, and explores the challenges and potential of the tree as a subject for art.