Marguerite Holloway, author of Take to the Trees, in conversation with Amy Johnson [08/21/25]

Porter Square Books is excited to welcome Marguerite Holloway for her book Take to the Trees. Amy Johnson will join Holloway in conversation.

This event will take place at our CAMBRIDGE store. We offer validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley's University Hall. See parking details below.

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ABOUT TAKE TO THE TREES

One of Heatmap's Climate Books to Read in 2025

An empowering journey into the overstory with the arborists and forest experts safeguarding our iconic trees.

Journalist Marguerite Holloway arrives at the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop as a climbing novice, but with a passion for trees and a deep concern about their future. Run by twin sister tree doctors Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll, the workshop helps people—from everyday tree lovers to women arborists working in a largely male industry—develop impressive technical skills and ascend into the canopy. As Holloway tackles unfamiliar equipment and dizzying heights, she learns about the science of trees and tells the stories of charismatic species, including hemlock, aspen, Atlantic white cedar, oak, and beech. She spotlights experts who are chronicling the great dying that is underway in forests around the world as trees face simultaneous and accelerating threats from drought, heat, floods, disease, and other disruptions.

As she climbs, Holloway also comes to understand the profound significance of trees in her relationship with her late mother and brother. The book’s rousing final chapter offers something new: a grander environmental and arboreal optimism, in which the story of trees and their resilience meshes with that of people working to steward the forests of the future, and of community found among fellow tree climbers. A lyrical work of memoir and reportage, Take to the Trees sounds the alarm about rapid arboreal decline while also offering hope about how we might care for our forests and ourselves.

PRAISE FOR TAKE TO THE TREES

Like the trees that it centers, this wonder of a book soars, oxygenates, roots, connects, and awes. It’s a paean to all things arboreal, a memoir about loss and community, and a call to engage in acts of caretaking for our trees and for each other. To do any one of these things well would have made for a good book; to do them all beautifully is a true gift.

— Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of I Contain Multitudes and Immense Worlds

Take to the Trees invites us to contemplate pushing past our own limits up into the treetops, as well as respecting the guidance of trees. I learned much from this wise book, and can only hope that many readers follow this writer up into the highest branches, to gain an understanding of where we are planted on this earth. Holloway’s insights are urgent and necessary.

— Sarah Ruhl, MacArthur fellow, playwright, and author of Smile

In her powerful and affecting book, Marguerite Holloway makes a case for how caretaking trees is really caretaking ourselves, and each other.

— Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Marguerite Holloway is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has written for the New York Times and the New Yorker, among other publications. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, and she lives in New York.

Amy Johnson’s short fiction and poetry have been published in Diabolical Plots, Escape Pod, Fantasy Magazine, GigaNotoSaurus, Lightspeed, and Small Wonders. Her short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and won NESFA’s Short Story Contest, and she was a City of Somerville Fellow in Literature in 2022. An author, anthologist, and scholar, she edited the Drones & Dreams (2019), Imagining a Democratic Future: Speculative Fiction (2023), and Stories from (Un)Identified Worlds (2023) anthologies and regularly runs workshops using speculative fiction techniques to explore the societal impacts of technology and social change. She’s currently working on a speculative suspense novel.

PARKING

Porter Square Books: Cambridge Edition offers validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley's University Hall. Roseland Street is accessible by Beacon Street and Mass Ave. When you arrive at the lot, use the screen on the kiosk to get a ticket.

When you're ready to leave, ask for a validation barcode at the cash register. (No purchase necessary.) Parking is free on weekends and weekday evenings from 6PM-7AM. From 7AM-6PM on weekdays the first 45 minutes are free.

Upon exiting the lot, scan your ticket and choose "validation." Then scan the barcode your received from us. If you have an additional charge, you will be prompted to pay after scanning your barcode.

Marguerite Holloway, author of Take to the Trees, in conversation with Amy Johnson

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Marguerite Holloway, author of Take to the Trees, in conversation with Amy Johnson

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Sponsored events

Climb to the Roof of Crane Estate & Explore Historic Ipswich | Save 15% with Code BOSCAL15

Atlantic Wharf's Summer Bash

Summer Concert Series & Beer Garden

Comedy at Summer Shack ($15 + Free Parking!)