Trees of San Francisco is a book about San Francisco's street trees -- containing photos and interesting text about 65 different trees that are common on the streets of the Bay Area - plus a few that aren't so common, but I thought would be interesting to readers.
The book also has 12 neighborhood walking tours (Castro/Eureka Valley, Cole Valley, the Financial District, Forest Hill, Golden Gate Park panhandle, the Mission, Noe Valley, Pacific Heights, Parnassus Heights, Potrero Hill, the Presidio, and an Upper Market Staircases tour) that take you past landmark trees in San Francisco's most interesting neighborhoods. Trees of San Francisco also identifies addresses of landmark trees in 23 different neighborhoods - a great source if you want to visit fantastic trees in the Sunset or on Potrero Hill.
Interspersed throughout the book are a dozen "sidelight" stories of tree-related content. For example, a piece on the city's wild parrots and their favorite trees; a story on a "secret garden" in Cole Valley with a great tree-history; and a ranking of the 20 most commonly planted trees in San Francisco (and how that has changed in recent years).
A second edition of the book was published in 2013 by Wilderness Press - the new edition has many more photos, and the number of tree tours was expanded to 12, from only seven in the first edition.
To get the book, you can order from Amazon. Even better, buy from one of our independent bookstores - the book is available at all of these:
Bird & Beckett (Glen Park)
Book Passage (in the Ferry Building)
Books Inc. (multiple locations)
Botanical Garden Bookstore (Golden Gate Park)
Christophers Books (Potrero Hill)
Green Apple
For some press about the first edition of the book, there’s this great story in SF Magazine by Lynn Rapoport, a fellow tree wonk who's a freelance journalist. Lynn does a great job explaining why it's satisfying to learn about urban trees. I really like this 2013 article in High Country News. There was this 2020 story from the Bold Italic, this Chronicle story from 2006, and the Noe Valley Voice did a story on me a ways back. More recently, Hoodline did this piece in 2019 on my tour of the Salesforce Park garden.
There’s a great audio link here to an interview I did with San Francisco’s “Roll Over Easy” radio station. It was a fun half hour, including lots of good San Francisco tree questions from their audience.
There have been a bunch of articles covering the “social distancing #covidtreetours” that I’ve been doing with Jason Dewees and Dick Turner, including this article by Carl Nolte in the Chronicle. Chronicle journalist Steve Rubenstein did another article a couple weeks later; and there is this piece from the Glen Park Association,