by Matt Stevens

Zsolt Debreczy is at home in the world. Well, at least in its temperate zones.

Born in Hungary and raised behind the Iron Curtain, Debreczy is at ease in just about any part of the world with a temperate climate. Take away the polar circles and tropics, and you’re left with vast stretches of geography in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The botanist spent a total of five years—cobbled together from countless trips over the past 15 years—scouring the woods in Europe, China, Taiwan, Japan, North America, Chile, the Caribbean, New Zealand, and Tasmania. His diligence paid off. He managed to track down and document nearly 500 species of conifers, including pines, spruces, firs, and cypresses.

“No one else has studied so many conifers in their native habitats throughout the world,” says Bill Thomas, former president of the American Conifer Society and co-editor of Growing Conifers: Four-Season Plants. “Debreczy’s study has been of worldwide significance and is an incredible undertaking that may never be matched by anyone else.”

Debreczy recently traded in his hiking boots for a desk in the Huntington’s botanical library, where he has been translating his book on conifers from his native language into English. He used the reference materials there to supplement his field notes. The revised and expanded work will be published by Dendro Press next spring.

His work space is in close proximity to that of Kathy Musial, Huntington curator of living collections, whose wide-ranging responsibilities include managing all acquisitions to the Garden’s permanent collections, as well as verifying the identification and correct nomenclature for all the plants in the collections. Several years ago Debreczy ventured to the outskirts of the Huntington grounds to help Musial identify some conifers whose labels had disappeared years before. Musial is returning the favor by serving as Debreczy’s editor.

Debreczy has labored a lifetime over how to capture the essence of a tree in words and images, and Musial admits to putting in many sleepless nights getting at the essence of Debreczy’s translations.

Debreczy published his original book in 2000 and called it Fenyök a föld Körül, a title that translates literally into “Conifers Around the Earth.” Translation is often an inelegant business, and though Debreczy is fluent in English, he benefits greatly from someone who might suggest the more palatable Conifers Around the World. Musial first met Zsolt—pronounced “jolt”—on an Earthwatch expedition to Chile in 1996. She is quick to explain that she is not a conifer expert: “Flowering plants are my gig.” Musial is comfortable with geography, however, and is a stickler for the accurate spelling of place names. (It’s not surprising that she is the ultimate arbiter for all labels in the Huntington gardens.)

Conifers Around the World has been a massive undertaking: more than 520 taxa (including subspecies and varieties) presented in 3,000 photographs bound in a two-volume set that will fill 840 pages. The English edition adds almost 200 species to the mix. Despite these impressive figures, the book pales in comparison to Debreczy’s greater obsession: The Dendrological Atlas. Dendrology is Greek for the “study of trees,” and “atlas” evokes—aside from the obvious connotation to mapping—the mythical hero who bore the world on his shoulders. Debreczy has been carrying the burden of this enterprise since 1971. At 34 years and counting, the atlas project has almost matched the half-way mark of James Murray’s ambitious compilation of 70-plus years—the Oxford English Dictionary.

Like Conifers Around the World, the atlas narrows its focus—if you can say that—to trees from the temperate and adjacent regions of the world. Based on field documentation, it will weigh in at 14 volumes—the first four focus on gymnosperms, with the remaining 10 volumes addressing angiosperms. Angiosperms are the flower-bearing plants and constitute by far the majority of the tree species in the world. Gymnosperms are in the minority, producing their seeds in exposed structures, like cones, rather than in protective ovaries housed in flowers. Conifers are a relatively small group of gymnosperms, numbering about 700 species. The gymnosperm portion of the atlas is a massive undertaking alone—with 10,000 black-and-white photographs and 480 full-page line drawings. A publication date has not been set.

Debreczy hadn’t set out to publish a distinct book on conifers. He and his long-time collaborator, photographer István Rácz, had amassed more than 340,000 black-and-white and color photographs over the years, many of which were taken for documentation purposes. The two collaborators frequently showed some of the images in slide presentations and lectures, including several talks at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum in the late 1980s and early 1990s when they both served as Mercer Fellows there. Both had begun their careers at the Natural History Museum in Budapest, now the Hungarian Natural History Museum—Debreczy in 1965, and Rácz in 1976. They interspersed their images with anecdotes from the field and research from their scholarship: the pair had published 12 books and 250 articles in Hungary before coming to Harvard.

While the plan for the atlas had always entailed black-and-white photographs accompanied by drawings, they realized that the color pictures could comprise a stand-alone book on conifers. Both works will appeal to nature lovers and professionals in the fields of botany, forestry, and horticulture, but Conifers is probably more accessible to the casual enthusiast.

Debreczy’s earliest inspiration was Alfred Rehder’s Manual of Cultivated Trees and Shrubs Hardy in North America: Exclusive of the Subtropical and Warmer Temperate Regions, first published in 1927 and revised in 1940. The subtitle might have given Debreczy an early inkling of how to set the parameters of his own future study. Rehder’s work was published only in English and forced Debreczy to expand his descriptive vocabulary. And the lack of any photographs or drawings did not discourage Debreczy as much as it fueled his imagination. How might he illustrate such a work?

From early childhood, Debreczy liked making sketches of insects and flowers and frequently exhibited his drawings in grade school. In college, he found success when he organized his information visually. He could take a 500-page botany textbook and convert it to 50 richly illustrated pages. He would then read the more manageable “guide” several times to absorb the material. “When I followed my method,” he says modestly, “I would earn the best grade.”

Producing a book requires a similar process—taking a wide base of knowledge and reducing it to its essence. In 1971 he had published a book on temperate-zone evergreens, relying heavily on the artistic talents of Vera Csapody. The botanical illustrator was already a legend in Hungary when Debreczy met her in the late 1960s. She had contributed 4,250 plant drawings to Sándor Jávorka’s ambitious Hungarian Flora in Pictures (1934). In the early stages of the atlas project, Debreczy didn’t have the resources to travel extensively and instead relied on Csapody’s renderings of dried and pressed specimens from the herbarium. Even though Csapody’s drawings were well crafted and precise, Debreczy noticed that they looked different from the trees he encountered in nature. “Plants, particularly woody plants,” he explained, “are not like butterflies, which can be rendered in flat drawings that are useful for viewing specimens in display cases or in the wild.” Branches, cones, needles, and leaves are very different in three dimensions. Thus, around 1973, he abandoned an expanding treasure trove of two-dimensional drawings and set out to capture specimens in three dimensions. Sadly, this realization coincided with Csapody’s declining health. He was able to secure the services of other talented artists, but he had to move on without his mentor and dear friend.

Debreczy loves talking about trees and relies on body language as much as any other form of communication. All of us have seen children “acting” like trees by standing still and spreading their arms in an effort to maximize their span. Debreczy has his own method of tree impersonation to convey the essence of a tree in its natural surrounding. To emphasize the protective “instincts” of a tree, Debreczy hunches over in a crouch, adopting the position of a school child in a classroom earthquake drill. Trees in nature are susceptible to a variety of forces: scarce resources, weather and soil variability, harsh climate, burrowing animals, and hungry insects, to name a few. Depending on circumstances, trees of the same species in the wild, therefore, might grow at different rates and exhibit variations in structure or size. Furthermore, one specimen or the other might be indistinguishable from a tree of a related—but distinct—species.

An unlikely example of a vulnerable conifer can be found on the outskirts of Oaxaca, Mexico. On a trip in the 1990s, Debreczy and Rácz gloried in the majesty of El Arbor del Tule and later wrote about it in an article in Harvard’s Arnoldia magazine. The tree, known to botanists as Taxodium mucronatum, is more commonly called the Mexican bald cypress or the Montezuma cypress. But nothing is common about this particular tree—more than 1,500 years old, its circumference is in excess of 200 feet. That means it takes nearly 20 people—joining hands and with arms fully extended—to encircle the massive trunk. The name of the town, Tule, derives from the word for “marsh” in the local Zapotec dialect. The small town has become threatened by the nearby city of Oaxaca, whose half million inhabitants vie for water and other resources. At the time of Debreczy’s visit, the tree had lost some of its light-green foliage, and some of its branches had become brittle and dry. Today, thanks to local intervention, the tree is getting the irrigation it needs to survive for future generations.

What might that conifer look like if it took root in a cultivated botanical garden or arboretum? In 1912, Mr. Huntington’s landscape gardener and ranch superintendant, William Hertrich, traveled to Chapultepec Park in Mexico City and brought back seeds of the same species. Three specimens now occupy the center of the Huntington’s Rose Garden, with several more gracing the Lily Ponds. At 93 years of age, they tower over the property but are mere saplings compared to the ancient giant. The Huntington specimens will not likely experience the dramatic explosion of growth—or the endangerment—of El Arbor De Tule. They lack the large, knotty “cypress knees” at their bases, which are common in swamp environs, where roots are submerged in water, as opposed to the soil found in the Huntington’s Rose Garden or even adjacent to the Lily Ponds. Debreczy can point out dozens of distinctions among trees of the same species depending on their locations. He appreciates botanical gardens and arboreta but understands that trees in cultivation can be radically different from those in nature.

His commitment to thoroughness requires exhaustive fieldwork, a challenge that does not come easy for someone who cut his teeth in a Soviet state. Ironically, his scramble for resources might have been more challenging after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Before then, Hungarian citizens were more likely to have the leisure time to support gardens and clubs, and the government provided more resources in support of the sciences. But Debreczy’s adaptive traits rival those of the trees he finds in nature. He splits his time between the Massachusetts-based International Dendrological Research Institute, where he is research director, and the International Dendrological Foundation in Hungary. On trips he continues to rely on collaboration with people like Musial, who helped Debreczy document the vegetation surrounding conifer specimens in Chile, Taiwan, and Japan; she also organized the fieldwork on trips to New Zealand and Australia. Debreczy has long practiced synecology, or the science of how plants live together in a habitat—a term that might just as easily apply to the interdependence of botanists and other professionals in the field.

After all these years, one might expect that Debreczy is ready to set down more permanent roots in one place, either in New England or Hungary. But as he explains, “The forests, rocky slopes, deserts, temperate rainforests, herbaria, and libraries of the world are my actual home—be they in Chile, China, or Mexico.” And now, as he spends more time in the library than in nature, he takes stock of his inventory of materials—photos, drawings, descriptions—and settles back to work with the same passion he exhibits in the field.

Matt Stevens is editor of Huntington Frontiers magazine.