William Bryant Logan
William Logan has spent the last five decades getting to know trees, as a writer, arborist, and teacher, first in coastal California and the Sierra Nevada, then for the last three decades in the regenerative forests of New York. Logan is an award-winning arborist and writer, and founder and president of the Brooklyn-based tree company Urban Arborists. His firm trains and cares for the pollards and aerial hedges in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has planned, planted, and currently cares for numerous landscapes and gardens at historic and significant properties in the Tri-State area. Logan lectures widely, from the Arnold Arboretum in Cambridge to the Huntington Library in Los Angeles and internationally, about the relationship between people and trees.
Logan’s earlier books are Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, and Air: The Restless Shaper of the World. Dirt inspired an award-winning documentary that was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. His essay “The Things Trees Know” was excerpted from Sprout Lands before the book’s publication and, published in Orion, won the 2020 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. Logan has written for the New York Times, Orion, Emergence, Natural History, House Beautiful, House & Garden, and many other publications, winning numerous Quill and Trowel Awards from the Garden Writers of America. He is on the faculty at the New York Botanical Garden and has taught poetry in the New York City schools and nature writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
Ten Things I Can’t Do Without
- Sprouting
- Nora
- Family and friends
- 1 John
- Oak trees
- The Mojave Desert
- Jessie the beast
- Rhubarb and thistles
- Hugh MacDiarmid
- Learning