Henrik Sjöman

Henrik Sjöman is a Swedish tree scientist and one of the most cited international voices on selecting trees for the cities and gardens of a changing climate. He is the co-author, with garden designer and broadcaster Arit Anderson, of The Essential Tree Selection Guide: For Climate Resilience, Carbon Storage, Species Diversity and Other Ecosystem Benefits (Filbert Press, 2023, in association with Kew Publishing) — a 528-page reference covering more than 550 trees suited to the world's temperate regions.

Henrik holds a PhD from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), where he is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher in the Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management. In parallel he serves as Scientific Curator at Gothenburg Botanical Garden — one of Europe's most species-rich botanical collections — and as an Honorary Research Associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His fieldwork has taken him on plant-hunting expeditions across Eastern Europe, China and North America, including a research stay at Cornell University in Ithaca.

Henrik's research centres on site-adapted tree selection for urban environments: how each species' capacity to deliver ecosystem services — cooling shade, rainfall interception, carbon storage, pollutant filtration, pollinator support — shifts with climate, soil and stress. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, with thousands of citations across the field, and has co-described new species new to science including Sorbus erythrosepala from Yunnan. The thread running through his work is a single argument: the urban treescape urgently needs greater species diversity, and tree choice should be matched to the natural habitats a species comes from rather than to custom or fashion.

Henrik lectures internationally to urban planners, landscape architects, garden designers and tree nurseries, and his work has been featured by the RHS Podcast, BBC Gardeners' World, Garden Masterclass, Gardens Illustrated, RHS The Garden, the Landscape Institute's Landscape, HortWeek, the Garden Club of America and The Forestry Journal. The Essential Tree Selection Guide carries a foreword by Kevin Martin, Head of Tree Collections at Kew, with endorsements from Tim Smit (the Eden Project), Dame Judi Dench, and leading urban-forestry academics including Cecil Konijnendijk (University of British Columbia).

Henrik's published research and full bibliography are available via his Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences profile and Google Scholar.

By Henrik Sjöman

The Essential Tree Selection Guide

For climate resilience, carbon storage, species diversity and other ecosystem benefits
with Arit Anderson · published in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

View the book