Hope Jahren grew up in rural Minnesota, playing in her father's community-college labs after dark, and became a geobiologist who has built and rebuilt her own laboratories three times. Her memoir braids two subjects. One is the secret life of trees, seeds, and soil, told with a scientist's precision and open love. The other is her decades-long partnership with Bill, a brilliant and troubled lab mate who follows her from grant to grant across the country. Jahren writes candidly about money, mental illness, and the physical labor of research, and about the rare joy of work shared with someone who understands it.