The Tree Pathways

Richard Mabey - Beechcombings

Richard Mabey's new book "Beechcombings: the narratives of Trees" (Chatto & Windus, October 2007) takes as its starting point the Great Storm and its unfortunate aftermath. Richard Mabey takes up the story:

"Twenty years ago this October, the greatest storm for three centuries laid flat 15 million trees across southern England. It marked a turning point in our perception of trees, a dramatic rediscovery of their importance in the landscape, a reawakening of old affections, above all a dawning realisation that they have lives of their own, beyond the roles and images we press them into.

In this book Richard Mabey traces the long history of the socialisation of trees in Europe, as successive eras made them into workhorses, ornaments, investments, status symbols. Into metaphors for the state, for the human body, for life itself. And now, in the crisis of global warming, into a panacea for healing the planet. And, uniquely, he has done this through the lens of just one species: the beech - the greatest casualty of the 1987 storm.

This, for Mabey, is an intensely personal choice. He grew up in the beechwoods of the Chilterns, spent much of his boyhood adrift amongst their pale trunks, and in the end bought one for himself, to explore first-hand the ancient relationships between humans and trees. And the beech - unlike better known species - is an oddity: moody, feminine, shape-shifting, prone to catastrophe. It defies stereotypes, and through it we can begin to understand the “otherness” of trees. Mabey’s vivid and dramatic “narratives” of the beech are both those we tell about it, and those it narrates itself, in its protean forms and ways of life. We hear the stories and image made of it by medieval Italian farmers and 20th century painters. How the idea of planting woods was invented in the17th century, and how the beech - no good for building warships - escaped. The great debate about the origins of natural beauty in the 18th century, and an extraordinary reinterpretation of the idea of picturesque beauty made through the science of biomechanics. How Freud, and the Wild Wood in Wind in the Willows (a beechwood), and Paul Nash’s paintings were entangled with scientific attempts to create a universal model for forest development in the 1930s.

And as constant counterpoint to these narratives, Mabey tells his own woodland stories, and how - passing from youthful hunter-gatherer to romantic teenager to, eventually, beechwood owner manager - he felt he was personally living through all these historical debates, experiencing them from the inside.

Through all these shifting images swim the great beeches themselves, the immense forest trees of Slovakia and Fontainbleau, the sinuous pollards of Epping and Burnham Beeches, the horizontal yet still vivacious beeches of the New Forest, the hunched elfin trees 5000 ft up Mont Ventoux, two thousand years old and still flourishing in 180 mph winds. And the heroine of Mabey’s story, the Queen Beech of Frithsden, his own totem tree that he has known since he was a child. All these trees are survivors, that have lived through partnerships with humans and are now following their own plans for the future. Will we allow them to continue? Can we begin to learn from trees - lessons about adaptability, economy, grace under fire - as well as trying to ‘educate’ them? Might a new mutual partnership with the largest and most significant organisms on the planet help us learn a new respect for nature? "

This book is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk

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