There are countless books on trees, woods and forests, that fixate on everything from their secret lives to how to make a chair out of them. But there are just a few authors that delve deep down into the green spirit of woodland and show how it is reflected in our psyche. If you have spent any time alone in a wood at night you will know what we are talking about here. One soon starts to feel what is rooting and burrowing beneath your feet; you sense birds roosting, bats hunting and badgers ambling through the undergrowth. A wood is far more than a collection of trees, it’s a multi-sensory trip into many intersectng realms, where one can encounter ageless myths and legends living still under the canopy. But be careful, for they are easily awoken.
So here are five books that we feel are amongst the best you will read about the wild primal woods.
Through The Woods
HE Bates
HE Bates was a great lover of the countryside and distilled this and an appreciation for rural life into prose of soaring elegance. Most people only know of him through The Darling Buds of May or My Uncle Silas, all of which have rural life running through their veins. His ‘pure’ nature writing appears in Through the Woods and Down the River, which are collections of his essays and observations, each exploring the landscape and nature of their titles.
Through The Woods describes a woodland year, but rather than dry observation and description, Bates summons us into a wood that he carries in his heart since youth. We’ve used a quote form the book elsewhere on this site which perfectly sums it up:
“If I shut my eyes it returns: the evocation of a whole wood, a whole world of wood-darkness and flowers and birds and late summer silence, of a million leaves turning mellowly to death. It becomes then more than the mere memory of a wood, the first and the best wood I have ever known. It is the redistillation of another and more lovely world.”
Mythago Wood
Robert Holdstock
There are countless myths and legends associated with wood and forest, from Jack-in-the-Green to Robin Hood and the spirits of trees to the Wild Hunt, we can’t help but be influenced by them. Indeed it seems one of the conditions of the human race that we see other levels of meaning and look beyond the mundane in the natural world around us. To get a sense of the supernatural within a wood the very best example must be Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. The folklore and mythology that surround a specific wood in Herefordshire are powerfully brought to life in this fantasy novel.
Michael Moorcock said of Holdstock ‘No other author has so successfully captured the magic of the wildwood’. You find yourself literally drawn into the power of the wood along with the characters, Holdstocks descriptions of the woodland are deeply evocative and stay with you long after you finish the book. Luckily he wrote several others (Lavondyss and The Bone Forest) that continue the story.
The Wood
John Lewis-Stempel
The Times reckons Lewis-Stempel ‘Britain’s finest living nature writer’, and I don’t think they are far wrong. Coming from Herefordshire farming stock where he can trace his family back 700 years, he combines a keen appreciation of place and history with a healthy dose of reality. He is no mere observer, this book is about a working wood that combines animal husbandry with woodland management. He spent four years managing the three and a half acre Cockshutt Wood and The Wood is basically his diary of his last year there. He has a knack of illuminating his observations with history, local knowledge and a down to earth spiritual connection with the land.
A thing that makes him unusual in this particular field of writing is that he has a sense of humour, all too often nature writing can get rather po-faced and take itself oh-so-seriously. Lewis-Stempel leavens his prose with a wry wit, which serves to anchor it more firmly in reality. We are with him on this journey, and one realises that it’s often the failures that can be learnt from and improved upon that are the best lessons in life.
The Woodlanders
Thomas Hardy
Yes, I know that Thomas Hardy is a divisive author, people seem to either love or loathe him. And, yes, some of the stories do hinge upon improbably tragic conicidences piling on top of one another, subjecting the characters to biblical doses of tragedy. But I would argue that he achieved something that few authors have. In his semi-fictionalised Wessex, he built a world for his novels where nature itself was a character. The relationship between characters and nature was one of parity, mankind was not above the natural world.
Hardy was thorough in his research and portrayed every aspect of nineteenth century rural life in meticulous and beautiful detail. In The Woodlanders (1887) the very wood in which the coppice workers live is a living, breathing entity, and has as much agency in the story as the men and women that move through it. Read it as if the wood itself is the main caharacter, there before the events of the book and long after. We think of ourselves at the centre of everything , but these human lives play out in less than a heartbeat for the natural world.
A Wood of One’s Own
Ruth Pavey
It’s all very well to describe a wood, but why not plant one from scratch? Ruth Pavey did just that in the Somerset Levels. A Wood of One’s Own beautifully sums up the reasion so mant of us need nature in our life, and why woodland is one of the most perfect places to reconnect, recharge and remeber what it is that is important in life.
“I am not sure why we humans should take comfort from the natural wiorld, harsh and implacable as it is, but there is something very buoyant about the comapny of trees, plants, animals, birds, insects, all intent upon their own lives. As far as we know they just get on with it, having offspring, trying not to starve, not to be eaten, without asking why. Perhaps some of this buoyancy transmits itself, helps us keep afloat too.”
It most certainly does. A Wood of One’s Own is a damn good read as well as a mediatation on what makes us tick. For many of us that connection to nature is not just something we can give or take. It is essential to our wellbeing both physically and mentally.
