I’ll start by saying many folks love Tallamy, and I do so appreciate his work for the native plant movement, but his writing makes him come off like a Master Gardener Final Boss and I can’t seem to get over it. I was hangry when I finished this book and wrote this. It’s probably why I used this unflattering jumpscarey photo of him from his most recent NYT Mag article instead of the book cover. I’m sorry in advance.

I got this book from the library because I wanted to learn about oaks, but I quickly learned I would actually be reading primarily about insects. I like bugs too, so it wasn’t a dealbreaker. By the end of the book I realized I was only going to learn about insects that live on the bark and leaves of oaks. Soil ecology be damned, no one wants to read about this rapidly evolving final frontier of ecology, it’s fine.

Another missing piece of this story was the human element. Oaks have been used by humans in North America for thousands of years, but there is zero cultural ecology in this book, other than a couple mentions of Tallamy’s vacation home, which apparently has a ton of oaks and inspired the text. What chance! How nice for him! (Bro is obsessed with exclamation marks btw. I was annoyed by that too of course.) There was a solid dig at humanity laid out in a few borderline xenophobic pages about invasive plants. These pages made it sound like the U.S. is the only place that deals with invasive species from the horrible foreign land that is Asia, a narrow perspective that I detest. I also had to roll my eyes when he used the slur name for spongy moth and put spongy moth in parentheses. The better name was right there, dude!

I did close this book with a couple new factoids under my belt about tannins and oak dispersal, and I think it is a good stepping stone for the pollinator garden crowd to better understand the value of trees so it’s not all bad. I think there were just a lot of missed opportunities for this book that might have been better taken advantage of by an author who wasn’t an old white dude obsessed with caterpillars and suburban ecopurism.

Stori