Description: Like Johnny Appleseed, who planted the Midwest with orchards, Jeff Meyer, a historian and tree farmer, found the seeds of the Famous and Historic Trees project while picnicking in the shade of Florida's Jacksonville Treaty oak. When his one-year-old son picked up an acorn, Meyer decided to plant it in his back yard -- and got the inspiration for his immensely popular project.

Under the auspices of American Forests, the country's oldest nonprofit conservation organization, Meyer has collected seeds from more than four hundred famous trees and sold thousands of saplings to customers including Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Cruise, Don Henley, and other tree and history buffs. He has planted trees at the White House, the Russian presidential residence, and Versailles and in all fifty states. He filmed a PBS special last year and is currently working on a thirteen-part series for PBS called Tree Stories.

In each of the seventeen chapters, Meyer tells the history of one tree -- from the 1600 Indian marker pecan to the 1971 moon sycamore -- and talks about his experience of propagating it, explaining exactly how the reader can grow the seeds of a personally important tree of that species. Among the trees in this book is an actual scion of the last living Johnny Appleseed Rambo apple.

Included are directions for ordering a "famous and historic" sapling as well as for finding the original trees.

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