Tree Bark A Color Guide Author:Hugues Vaucher How often do we overlook bark, a frequently beautiful and always important part of the plant, focusing instead on leaves, flowers, and the shape of the trunk and branches? Hugues Vaucher, a Swiss watchmaker with a lifelong fondness for trees and an eye for detail, illustrates the rich variety of colors, patterns, and textures of bark with more t... more »han 550 photographs in Tree Bark: A Color Guide. For a number of the trees, he provides photographs of younger and older specimens, showing the distinctive changes that age makes in bark, which must develop and expand to accommodate the growth of the tree. This unique book also covers the diversity of bark in chapters on the structure, anatomy, and physical properties of this "clothing" of trees. Though humans have tended to concentrate on the uses of wood, bark has nonetheless lent itself to a rich variety of applications, and a chapter documents the surprisingly varied ethnobotany of bark. The medicinal properties of several types of bark are carefully outlined, and the reader will never think of cork as just a bottle-stopper again. Originally published in French and German in the early 1990s, this new Timber Press edition of Tree Bark has been improved and expanded to include more than 440 species and varieties of trees from around the world. For this new book, tropical and subtropical trees, and trees from the Southern Hemisphere, have been added to broaden the coverage.« less