Knowledge organization systems that made me go 😍 (pt. 2)

And my last day as non-Canadian 🍁

By the time you read this, I would have taken an Oath of Citizenship to Canada, the place I’ve called home since 2008.

I am now officially part of a very small group of Norwegians with dual citizenship 🇳🇴🇨🇦🎉

I recorded a video marking the start of my citizenship journey. I will (with 70% certainty) also make a video marking the finale.

What a journey it’s been. While I am not one to shy away from international adventures, it’s a different type of satisfaction to establish roots in one place.

I’m very happy and grateful to have that opportunity in Canada, surrounded by so many great people that I’ve met over the years. It truly feels like coming home, finally.

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Last week I wrote about the intake form for my Naturopathy Doctor. This week it’s about books. And not just any type of books.

A short walk from my home is Acadia Books. It’s a store for used, out-of-print, antiquarian books. Their books include a great selection of art books, including monographs, photography, architecture and original graphics. When you walk in, you feel you’re transported to a different age altogether and it. is. marvellous.

(Pssst do you have old and quirky bookstores in your town? I encourage you to check them out for fun! Let serendipity lead you to a book that speaks to you, and take it with you home as a souvenir. There’s nothing more life-making to me than wandering around in an old bookstore.)

So it turns out, I have a strange obsession with reference books. And one such book caught my eye during my visit at Acadia Books. It was this book:

A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, by George A. Petrides

Every reference book is a work of art; this one especially so. The typesetting is exquisite. The graphic style is understated (just a green colour for highlights), perhaps to not distract from the sheer amount of raw information being conveyed on each page. The backbone of a reference book is its information organization and wayfinding implementation. In this sense, this book is not a disappointment.

Even a complete noob (like me) could be wandering around somewhere, randomly come across a tree, and successfully identify it using only the book at hand, within minutes. How, you ask?

Let me tell you first how it’s NOT organized.

No, the information is not listed alphabetically. Most people can’t name the top ten trees in their neighbourhood, so names would be useless.

No, the information is not listed by geography. The prevalence of a tree species is very diffuse. Any point of the map could potentially be the home of many dozens of tree and shrub species.

The way it is organized is first by leaf type identification.

The five main ways a leaf can be structured is the starting point of tree identification in this book.

Did you know that all tress and shrubs ever could be subdivided into major five leaf arrangements? I did not. I knew about deciduous and evergreen trees. Why no-one has told me about this before, I don’t know. It feels like outrageously basic information to come across as an adult, but ok.

After identifying which one of the five leaf arrangements you’re dealing with, you learn a bit more about leaf anatomy like leaf shape, twig and bud terminology, and leaf and twig terminology. You’re basically learning a new language that helps you identify trees just by looking at them and reading their body language.

leaf shape, twig and bud terminology, and leaf and twig terminology

Once you generally know what type of tree/shrub it is (oak, birch, maple etc) the next challenge is to figure out which sub-genus your specimen falls under. For this, there are several ways to get to the answer. One way is to use a very elaborate nested list to assist with this. Here’s the one for Willows:

A Key into to the world of Willow identification

Dear lord. There are over 50(!) types of Willows in these parts of the world. Turns out willows are basically impossible to correctly identify, unless you have this book of course.

The Maple section shows another way to identify the particular type of Maple that is in front of you:

The start of the Maple section.

Notice the amount of detail and nuance the illustrations communicate to the reader. They could have easily taken pictures and been done with it. Instead, they opted for a uniform illustration style that put the focus on the right differences to pay attention to.

And then there’s the case of identifying trees from afar. Because sometimes you simply aren’t close enough to look at the twigs of a tree. For this, they have a section on tree silhouettes for most common trees in the hood:

Tree silhouette diagrams for identifying trees from afar.

Not only are the silhouettes exquisitely drawn, the small descriptions beneath each are power-packed with pertinent information about that tree species AND they are shorter than your average tweet. The amount of high quality info offered here is wild.

Hold on. There’s one issue with all of this. What if… you’re identifying trees during the winter when there are no leaves? Does tree-identification fall by the wayside after autumn, and come back again for spring?

Nah, the tree book got an answer for this.

Tree silhouettes… this time, no leaves!

Yes, no kidding. You can learn how to identify a tree in winter by generally studying its silhouette. Drawn out like this, it’s fascinating how you can easily spot the differences versus seeing them in the wild. Compliment this with the whole chapter on how to read the leaf scars left on a twig after their leaves have fallen, and you are now capable of a 80% success rate in identifying trees during winter… 💅

Final thoughts: This book is one of the most elaborate arrangements of “if X, then Y” kind of adventures, specifically meant to lead you down a path towards successful identification. It’s brilliant in how, through each step along the way, you are orders of magnitude closer to identifying the mystery tree in front of you.

Ultimately, the design of this book proved to me that information can mean nothing without gateways, maps, and wayfinding devices to approach the information with.

Up until I bought this book, I truly believed that tree identification was a dying art because it seemed so difficult to get into. This reference book proves that it can be super easy and that anyone can do it with this book at hand. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not come across this book randomly in an antiquarian bookstore.

Gotta love serendipity.

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Hey again friend! Thanks for coming through and reading what essentially became a love letter to a reference book on trees. Is there a book in your life that falls under the category of remarkable book that belongs on paper? Let me know in the comments.

Give this letter a ❤️ if you enjoyed it (and pls share the letter with a friend who may appreciate it too!)

As always, stay safe and stay curious.

—Fei🪢

PS. Thanks to Michael who did some superb hand modelling for me for all the book images in this letter 💅😘