On April 30, 2026, from 7-8pm (CST), Daniel Lewis, the Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Southern California, takes us on a sweeping journey to plant breeding labs, botanical gardens, research facilities, deep inside museum collections, to the tops of tall trees, underwater, and around the Earth, journeying into the deserts of the American west and the deep jungles of Peru, to offer a globe-spanning perspective on the crucial impact trees have on our entire planet.
When a once-common tree goes extinct in the wild but survives in a botanical garden, what happens next? How can scientists reconstruct lost genomes and habitats? How does a tree store thousands of gallons of water, or offer up perfectly preserved insects from millions of years ago, or root itself in muddy swamps and remain standing? How does a 5,000-year-old tree manage to live, and what can we learn from it? And how can science account for the survival of one species at the expense of others?
Twelve Trees “brims with wonder, appreciation, and even some small hope” (Booklist) and is an awe-inspiring story of our world, its past, and its future.
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Daniel Lewis, PhD
Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Daniel Lewis is the Huntington Library’s Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology. He holds the PhD in History and has had post-doctoral appointments at Oxford University, the Smithsonian, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. Dan was responsible for the exhibition “Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changed the World,” which opened in 2008 and ran until 2020. More than three million people visited the show, which was named as the best exhibit in America by the American Alliance of Museums the year after it opened.
Dr. Lewis is also an environmental historian and college professor, with a faculty appointment at Caltech, where he teaches courses in environmental history and humanities. In a strange turn, he also won an Emmy in 2020. His latest book, Twelve Trees, which came out in March 2024, was published by Simon & Schuster. Chapters have been excerpted in Time magazine, the Smithsonian magazine, Scientific American, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He was interviewed by Ari Shaprio for All Things Considered the day the book came out, and has appeared on radio shows from Canada to Australia to Oregon to San Francisco to North Carolina. There are also two different Chinese translations of the book underway. This is his fourth book.
