Strange animals, unsustainable cities, evolving beings, and nature-seeking proletarians populate Italo Calvino’s oozingly ecological narrative worlds. This essay examines one of Calvino’s most popular novels, The Baron in the Trees (1957), contextualizing it within the landscape it is set in and exploring the multifaceted strands of its environmental creativity. Under close inspection, unforeseen paths of political ecology, environmental history, and even biosemiotics and plant neurophysiology emerge, bringing the clairvoyance of his work vis-à-vis our current planetary crises to the fore. This piece is an invitation to read literary works not only alongside their landscapes but in their landscapes, and to consider the potential of stories in the shaping of our environmental imagination.