Georgia O'Keeffe, Vincent van Gogh, Claire Cansick, John Singer Sargent, Annie Ovenden…for these esteemed artists and dozens of others, a tree was never "only a green thing that stands in the way," but rather an element of our natural world offering an infinite variety of beauty and meaning. The Book of the Tree is devoted to more than one hundred "trees in art," a strikingly beautiful collection of arboreal-themed paintings, drawings, and illustrations. Scattered among the images are nature-themed quotations and snippets of poetry, along with brief texts about twenty artists and their towering subjects, from Gustav Klimt's mosaic-like Pear Tree to the sun-drenched trees of Stanislawa de Karlowska's Postimpressionist Landscape.