forest

Alpine Flowers Tales (Alpenblumenmärchen) is a 1922 illustrated storybook that describes the woodland adventures of two acorn children who get swept away by the autumn winds. Author Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956) was a Swiss painter largely known for his watercolor illustrations for children's books about flower fairies and small creatures in nature. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library has a large collection of 19th century illustrated children's books in many languages.

This highly unusual book's title translates to: A Representation of Inland and Foreign Wood: As Well Trees as [sic] Shrubs which are Collected by the Lovers of Natural History in their Cabinets of Natural Curiosities for Use and Pleasure… Exotic and rare wood samples were often artifacts that were part of a collection of curiousities, as well as the woods used in crafting a cabinet of curiousities. This is a survey of indigenous woods from around the world.

There is a commonly held superstition that illicitly removing specimens of petrified wood from Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park is bad luck. As a result, the National Park Service receives many of these returned rocks with “conscience letters” of regret from over the years. The letters have been carefully archived and the purloined samples are now in a “conscience pile” at the end of the park property. The rocks cannot be distributed on the park land as the exact provenance for each piece can never be known, and areas need to be kept as pristine as possible for future research.