Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees
Author(s): Richard Mabey
Richard Mabey's new book is about beech trees - but also, of course, about numerous other issues, including global warming and the importance of trees in the landscape. Trees are the largest and most significant organisms on our planet; and this is Mabey's most poetic, most enjoyable, most profound and challenging book to date.
Beech trees reached Britain about 8,000 years ago, and they were workhorses, not ornaments - fuel for Rome's glassworks; firewood for London; oars for the ships of Venice; raw material for furniture, cut and turned by 'bodgers' who lived like nomads among the trees in huts made of beechwood shavings. Mabey covers Europe as well as Britain, and autobiography as well as history and natural history. His beeches are characterful - 'hectic, gale-sculpted, gnomic' - and he writes about the bluebells, orchids, fungi, deer and badgers associated with them, as well as the narratives we tell about trees and the images we make of them. Many other kinds of tree are featured, and the portraits and celebrations of the beech always point to the larger story. More than all this, Beechcombings is a personal investigation of the ambivalent, engimatic relationship that humans have with trees.
Product Information
Trees are the largest and most significant organisms on our planet; and this is Mabey's most poetic, most enjoyable, most profound and challenging book to date.
"Wonderfully subversive, far-reaching and unsentimental" Observer "Richard Mabey is a man for all seasons, most regions and every kind of landscape" -- Andrew Motion Financial Times "Beechcombings is a treasure trove of fact and anecdote linked to the beech tree... By the time you have reached the end of the book you will have accumulated an encyclopaedic knowledge of the uses and merits of different timbers and you will have an extensive list of locations to visit. A welcome present" -- Michael Heseltine Spectator "The latest book from the doyen of our nature writers employs a key critical concept of recent decades to explore how we really see the natural word - with fascinating results... a terrific combination of both natural and intellectual history, informed by penetrating insight" Independent "Like the woodlands itself, Beechcombings operates on many levels... Busting out is a leaf-storm of philosophical musings, journeys of mind and body, reflections and anecdotes that imprint the tree on human culture" Sunday Times
Among Richard Mabey's acclaimed publications are Food for Free (his first book and never out of print), Gilbert White (Whitbread Biography of the Year) and the ground-breaking bestseller Flora Britannica, which won the British Book Awards' Illustrated Book of the Year and the Botanical Society of the British Isles' President's Award and was runner-up for the BP Natural World Book Prize. He collaborated on Birds Britannica (which was his idea) and his most recent book, Nature Cure, described as 'A brilliant, candid and heartfelt memoir', had such wide appeal that it was shortlisted for no fewer than four prestigious prizes: the Whitbread Biography, the J.R. Ackerley for autobiography, Mind (for its investigation into depression) and the Ondaatje for the evocation of the spirit of place. Richard Mabey was born and brought up among the beech woods of the Chilterns, and now lives in Norfolk.
General Fields
- :
- : Yellow Jersey Press
- : Yellow Jersey Press
- : 0.239
- : 31 August 2008
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Special Fields
- : 16
- : 304
- : 583.46
- : 1
- : Paperback
- : Richard Mabey