“Trees can live without us, but we cannot live without them,” write Diane Cook and Len Jenshel. Supported by a National Geographic Society grant, the husband- and-wife team spent two years traveling the world creating portraits of Wise Trees (Abrams, $40). The result is a breathtaking photographic monument to more than fifty ancient, majestic specimens. There are those whose rooted presence has made deeply influential marks upon human culture: Siddhartha’s Bodhi, Isaac Newton’s apple tree, and the Derby Boab brought by aboriginal peoples from Africa to Australia some 1,500 years ago. Others quietly bear witness to horrific chapters of human history: the Hiroshima bonsai and Nagasaki survivor trees, a Southern Live Oak that served as Texan gallows, and a massive Monkeypod against which children were beaten to death in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Still other specimens exhibit inspiring impassiveness to human concerns and epochs: the California Redwoods, the “Tomb Raider” strangler fig of Angkor Wat, and the Magna Carta yew thought to predate the birth of Christ. And then there are those bewildering beauties made fragile by human interference: a vandalized California Sequoia, and “Pando,” the eighty thousand year old clonal colony of aspen trunks in Fishlake Forest, Utah.