He got to work on what would become “ New York City Trees,” first published in 1999 by Columbia University Press in collaboration with the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation and the New York Tree Trust. On a walk home through New York’s Riverside Park, he tripped on some fallen sour gum balls and inspiration struck. After retiring from Reader’s Digest, he developed a greater interest in natural history.

“It’s intended to be very readable and accessible.” Inspired by city treesīarnard has had a lengthy career in publishing. “The book is meant for a general audience, someone like me who is interested in trees but may not know the difference between a black oak and a red oak,” Barnard says. The book also includes a brief history of Philadelphia’s “arboreal heritage,” authored by Penn alum David Hewitt a quick reference guide to trace trees to their taxonomic groups in the book’s inside cover more than 1,000 color photographs, maps, and line drawings and a bibliography. The book is broken into three major sections: one on some of the top tree-watching locations in greater Philadelphia, another profiling 50 notable trees in the region, and a field guide including 168 species to help readers identify the trees they’re most likely to encounter locally. Meyer coauthored the pocket-sized, 280-page work with Catriona Bull Briger and Edward Sibley Barnard. Such impassioned feeling for trees is woven through the pages of “ Philadelphia Trees,” a field guide originally published in 2017 and updated and republished this year by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The new cover depicts a different stand of trees at the same site, with its iconic skyline view. The cover image, for example, was swapped after an ailing sugar maple was removed from the city’s Belmont Plateau. The new edition of “Philadelphia Trees” features new photography and updated write-ups of notable trees and places to see them.

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