Detail from cover

From the book ...

"Outside my window the trees in a little wood stand leafless. Everything which made this wood a delight in June, the contrast of light and share among the leaves, the varying tones of green in broken sunlight, the warmth and color and summer freshness, has gone, but the trees themselves, in all their wealth of foliage were never so beautiful as now. The massive moulding of their trunks, the graceful curves of their branches, the fine tracery of their little bare twigs, now clear against the sky and again lost in a tangled network of intersecting branches, the whole beauty of their symmetry, their poise, strength, and delicacy is revealed as it is never revealed in summer.

"Attracted first by the obvious grace of the forms of trees as we see them from our windows in winter, we discover that a closer study of the details of bare twigs and buds in the woods discloses unsuspected beauty in texture, form, and color. Each tree has definite traits of its own which distinguish it from every other tree, and by tracing individual characteristics in the branches, trunk, stems, buds, and leaf-scars we are able to identify every tree with certainty."