Between 1906 and 1913, Henry John Elwes and Augustine Henry published The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland in seven volumes — fifteen parts — running to more than two thousand pages. It was an inventory of specimens, and photographs carried much of its weight: the project was conceived as a picture catalogue as well as a botanical one, ambitious in scale and systematic in method.
RRB Photobooks’ 2025 book of the same name draws directly on that earlier publication. Its concern is the photographic material. Trunks are measured against a human figure; canopies are studied from below; a tree is framed to show habit rather than beauty. Read today, these plates describe not only British and Irish trees but the working habits of early twentieth-century documentary photography.
Michael Pritchard contributes an essay, and a postscript follows it. The publisher credits Elwes, and the volume appears in English in 2025. The result is neither facsimile nor exhibition catalogue but a re-editing: a body of work about trees, assembled so that the images rather than the taxonomic argument lead.
For collectors, the interest is structural. The original is dispersed across large sets and auction lots, and its photographs are usually encountered as illustration subordinated to text. Here they are the subject, sequenced for attention. That shift — from reference work to photographic book — is what gives this edition its character, and it is worth judging on the strength of the plates themselves.
A note on the edition: no statement of print run, limitation or binding accompanies the title, so nothing of that kind should be assumed. What can be said is that the book returns a documented photographic corpus to circulation in a single, edited form.
