This is one of the best books I have ever read about science, and about a life. Jahren is a passionate and witty writer, and in this book she tells stories beginning with her strict Minnesota childhood in the 1970s, ending with her current career as a tenured professor and researcher at the University of Hawaii. She has loved both plants and the scientific process for as long as she can remember, but it was a long and hard road to turn those two obsessions into a livelihood. Jahren writes of working long hours as a hospital runner to pay for college; of meeting her best friend and future research partner in grad school on a soil study field trip; of upending her entire life multiple times to move thousands of miles on the promise of funding to build her own lab. There are short chapters woven through that explain with vivid, careful detail the lifestyle stages of a tree, and each stage is mirrored in Jahren's only human development. She doesn't shy way from discussing her own manic depression, the difficulty of her pregnancy, and the discrimination she faced as a woman in her field. But she also relishes in the joys of discovery, of breakthroughs, of adventure, of a fairy-tale like love romance and an eternal striving towards being her own truest, purest self. This book is going to join my self of favorite memoirs. I highly recommend it!

EDIT: Read it out loud to my dad on a road trip in 2021. A very good book to read while traveling.