BIO 20N: Peregrinations With Trees

Course Description

"Stay awhile," says Mary Oliver's "When I am among the trees." Accompanied by guest lecturers and experts, we will wind our way around the magnificent trees of the Stanford campus, using Ron Bracewell's Trees of Stanford and its Environs as a guide. We will use trees as a perch from which to gaze upon human activities: poetry, literature, painting, mathematics, computer science, agriculture, economics, environmental history. We will learn to recognize individual tree species and to appreciate their distinctive contributions as features of ecosystems and constructed landscapes. The capstone of the course is a project you will develop based on the connections of trees to your own interests in art, biology, computer science, literature, the environment, or other academic domains. The course goal is for you to deepen your appreciation for the importance and majesty of trees, toward enriching your experience of the campus and the world. At the end of the course, like Henry David Thoreau, we hope you can say "I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees."