Some green reading
Here, in no particular order, are some books which have caught my imagination and shaped my thinking in 2020.
The Hidden Life of Trees This book is by a forest manager in the Eifel mountains in Germany. If you’ve ever felt comforted and enfolded in the company of a tree, Peter Wohlleben explains why, with a forest of facts. Trees can share food, nourishing each other via a fungal network. They communicate via electrical impulses, they smell and they taste. They can fight disease communally. And much much more…
This book got me into hugging trees in Archbishop’s Park during lockdown. I kept being drawn to a little cedar tree, with thick drops of sticky sap on its trunk. It wasn’t an immediately impressive specimen, but close up and mid hug I started to feel its presence and the steady reassurance of its energy. It took me several days and several hugs to notice that someone had lashed a thick metal chain around my new pal, and that an attached railing had caused a deep wounding cut to its trunk. I felt so guilty that I hadn’t noticed this. Once lockdown was over I borrowed a chain cutter and was so satisfied and happy to cut the cedar free.
Jini Reddy has tapped into the British desire for wildness with an upbeat title called Wild Times, which describes wild encounters in the UK – foraging materials for natural painting, horse whispering, prehistoric outdoor cookery and so on. She has also written a book about finding magic in the British landscape called Wanderland. If I wanted to be mean I’d say that Wild Times commercialises wilderness as a series of (often expensive) ‘experiences.’ But I’m probably just jealous I didn’t have this idea and write this book myself. It must have been so much fun to research - it’s published by Bradt, an independent publisher who specialise in thoughtful, ethical travel guides.
Sue Stuart-Smith’s The Well Gardened Mind is a subtle and very literary exploration of how gardening can help people recover from trauma. If like me you have fuzzy feelings about how gardening lifts your mood, this will back you up with cogency and case studies, charting how growing projects have helped people recover from wartime experiences, addiction and grief.
Wilding by Isabella Tree is a great read, about the Knepp wilding project on a Sussex farm estate. It’s factual without being dry, heartfelt without being sentimental and celebratory without being smug. The project is a template for the sadly wildlife-depleted British countryside, and Wilding has spread the word. It’s a handbook for wilding enthusiasts, and points the way to a better future.
On a similarly unpretentious note is The Joyful Environmentalist by Isabel Fonseca. If you want to green up your life she’ll tell you how, with a barrage of sound advice on everything from food shopping to home energy to banking to activism. Isabel has tried it all herself, and there is an engaging personal narrative here that makes even the techy nitty gritty of this book very readable. The ‘Bug Houses and English Bluebells’ chapter is a good one for wildlife gardeners, and the section on living off grid may have you heading for the Welsh hills.
Weighty, mighty, Pulitzer Prize winning… The Overstory by Richard Powers is a good book to settle down with on a winter’s night. Its separate narratives turn out to have deep rooted connections, as threatened trees begin to the shape the events of the novel. The sections about conflict between activists and the state are powerful and distressing, and the description of living in a tree canopy is unforgettable.
