(pictured: TreeGirl, Thomas Pakenham, & TreeBoy)

A few weekends ago I had the ecstatic pleasure of hanging out with Meeting with Remarkable Trees author, Thomas Pakenaham. The occasion was a benefit for Canopy, a noteworthy urban tree planting organization in Palo Alto. (www.canopy.org ) Thanks to my new Master Arborist friend, Dave Muffly, (A.K.A. Oakboy) on the Board of Canopy, I had the chance of a lifetime to tour the trees of Palo Alto, including this champion Aleppo Pine Pinus Halepensis.

If you've never seen Pakenhams series of books, by all means, do as soon as possible! Thomas' work has inspired this TreeGirl to journey around the world, in search of the most spectular tree people on the planet. Thomas is a sweet, gentle soul, with an intense pleasure for tree identification and, of course, photographing them. A brilliant man, Thomas is already the Earl of Longford in Ireland, and I havn't told him this yet, but I am also dubbing him to be an honorary TreeBoy. For a man of his worldy experience, boy seems like an unlikely title, but still, I hope he considers it a compliment. 

His most recent book, In Search of Remarkable Trees On Safari in Africa, as well as The Remarkable Baobab are my primary resources for my upcoming Autumn journey to South Africa and hopefully Madagascar to make love with the baobabs, including the 2nd largest (in girth) tree on the planet.  (The largest is a cypress in Oxaca, Mexico.)Look for the Africa Series sometime in October!