Seeing the trees for the wood
You’re up an oak tree somewhere between Ashtead and Epsom in Surrey. Wet lichens glow as you hunt for a footing on slick limbs. From the top of the canopy, the land turns to sea and glades appear as ‘oceans between continents of trees’. A ghostly armada of dead oaks lies becalmed in a clearing – a bleached collection of hulks left from a fire that happened decades ago. Like the titular character of Dr Seuss’s The Lorax, Luke Barley speaks for the trees, and his ambition is to make armchair woodlanders of us all. Ancient is his history of British woodlands – which turn out to be a lot
