MIGHTY

Stately illustrations track an oak from seedling to majestic maturity.

Cole doesn’t cover the tree’s entire life cycle in his finely textured, minutely detailed black-and-white drawings, but he does turn out a grand tale. It all begins with a blue jay that, pursued by a hawk, drops an acorn over a forest meadow. As seasons pass, the seedling grows into a sapling and then, over several centuries, into a spreading, thickly branched giant. Along the way, exactly drawn moths, migrating songbirds, and many other wild creatures flit through its dense sprays of leaves. In time, a single hole in a branch becomes home to nuthatches, flying squirrels, and wood ducks in succession, while small, generic human figures, including Indigenous people, sit in the shade below. The appearance of a simple cabin is followed by ever more and larger structures, until a town grows all around; in an expansive final scene, a crowd of modern residents gathers around the huge trunk in celebration. In closing comments amid vignettes of forest stories and subsurface biota, the author makes his theme explicit by describing how a tree such as this is a habitat that becomes an ecosystem of interdependent living things. So rich are the illustrations that viewers paging back are sure to spot more of those temporary and permanent residents each time. A few figures in the climactic crowd scene are dark-skinned.

A thought-provoking book with lavish artwork that rewards close, and closer, looks.