The king of trees

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been planting up much of the pasture on our small Cornish farm with native hardwood trees, mainly oak. I now know I needn’t have bothered. As soon as the grass stops being cut, little oaks spring up of their own accord. This last dry summer in particular has seen dozens appear, tiny three-leaved stalks that push through the sward with their multi-layered greens beautifully tinged with reddish anthocyanin. It gives the impression that if everywhere were simply left, and if there were no browsing beasts, it would be a matter of decades before all open country reverted to its post-glacial pre-neolithic state of wild oakwood.

The oak stands out not only as our most abundant tree, and the largest in volume, but also deeply impressive in almost every respect. From its robust youth to its magnificent maturity and long old age, it has a presence that is tempting to anthropomorphise. This princely tree, man’s arboreal companion! Of the many tree books published in recent years, none has been more successful than Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, in which he examines how trees ‘feel’ and ‘talk’ to each other. It is an engaging study, not as unscientific as it sounds — but it falls into a trap that John Lewis-Stempel, with a countryman’s guile, steps around. Citing the Ents, Tolkien’s breed of talking trees in Lord of the Rings, he comments: ‘A tree is not an Ent.’

Lewis-Stempel is one of the best of the new generation of nature writers, an oak himself in that particular corner of the literary forest. As a working farmer, from a long line of Herefordshire farmers, he has daily exposure to his source material. In books such as Meadowland, The Running Hare and, most recently, The Wood, he has distilled his knowledge and his enthusiasm into a style that is as rich and earthy as its subject.