David More was born in 1954 in Dingwall, Scotland, and educated in Kent. After training as an artist, he worked in the cartographic service of the Royal Navy, an oil company, and the Department of the Environment, before leaving to make painting a full-time career. He worked briefly as an art teacher in London, and quickly received commissions from institutions as varied as the BBC, Oxford University, the Walt Disney Corporation and the Irish Electricity Board. But the study of trees had always been a passion for him, and he illustrated or contributed to several books before privately embarking on Trees of Britain and Europe – a project so ambitious that he feared no publisher would undertake it. For many years he spent all the time he could at Kew and other great tree collections, drawing and gathering material for this remarkable book.
