Publisher's Weekly Review
In this intriguing volume, British paleontologist Fortey (Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms) charts the discoveries he made over the course of a year on the four acres of Oxfordshire land that he purchased in 2011. Fortey's "inner naturalist needed to touch living animals and plants," and he recounts those experiences by devoting a chapter to each month. He begins in April, following the changing seasons and collecting "the wood's serendipitous treasures." Fortey gives further structure to his narrative-and his treasure collection-through the construction of a cabinet of curiosities that he and his wife, Jackie, commissioned a woodworking neighbor to build out of one of their cherry trees. It would be different from the "systematic collection" he worked with for years at the Natural History Museum in London: each item would be a memento of encounters in their small patch of woods. As Fortey spends time observing and pondering, he becomes enraptured by the forest floor draped with bluebells. Imagining a continuum of individual and collective relationships that stretches back centuries, he duly charts his historical explorations of the land in parallel with his naturalistic ones. Focusing on his small world, Fortey effectively compiles "a biography of the wood" and reminds readers that stories can be found anywhere. Illus. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The long view seems to be underappreciated in our breathless, social-media-driven times. It's one of the reasons why Fortey's (Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms, 2012) everyday discoveries about his small patch of woodland provide such unadulterated pleasure. Here, then, is an in-depth portrait of nature as it unfolds over the course of one year in the Chiltern Hills of Oxfordshire, England. There is no fixed agenda, just the sheer joy of solitude as Fortey observes the variety of carpet moths in June, of mushrooms in October. He also considers humanity's relationship with nature, researching the customs of people who lived on this land in centuries past. The discovery of a small trench launches an exploration of Grim's Dyke, a man-made construction already old by Saxon times. Fortey's brilliantly absorbing exercise in ecology and anthropology occasionally gets lost in the thickets, but it is nevertheless a tender ode to life's seasonal cycles and an essential reminder that one needn't travel far and wide to appreciate the many splendors of nature. A backyard will do just fine.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SOME OF THE MINOR WAYS in which American English differs from British English point to different approaches to looking at the world, and the word "wood" is a case in point. In American, it is a substance; in British English, it is also a place. Americans do not generally refer to a wood; they say the woods, where bears proverbially relieve themselves, or woodlands, or sometimes a woodlot, but a discrete parcel of the primary forest that once covered the land scarcely excites the American imagination. Britain is different, because its countryside is much smaller-scale and more intimate, with vast forests the exception, and a block of trees no more extensive than a soccer pitch can be cherished, especially if threatened. Indeed, individual British woods are instinctively regarded with affection, and in recent years the idea of owning one's own small wood has, in Britain, grown in popularity. Richard Mabey, doyen of English nature writers, has written lyrically of the beech wood he owned in the Chiltern Hills to the northwest of London (pleasingly referring to himself merely as its "custodian," as opposed to its proprietor). Now here comes another writer about the natural world, with his own Chiltern beech wood, and his own book about it. Richard Fortey is a paleontologist, formerly in residence at London's Natural History Museum, who is also an acclaimed popularizer of science, a man with talent as a storyteller; and with his earnings from a TV nature series, he bought Grim's Dyke Wood, four acres of beeches and bluebells a mile away from his hometown, Henley-on-Thames, and decided to compile its biography. You can do that with a named wood; it is finite, it has boundaries, it is a self-contained world. Fortey realized that the account of his wood needed to be conducted on two levels, the human as well as the scientific, because the English countryside has been shaped for millenniums by people. The results, presented in "The Wood for the Trees," are fascinating: a vivid history of the nearby manor house, Greys Court, and its noble families who owned the wood for hundreds of years, and of the woodsmen who turned the harvested timber into everything from kindling to chair legs; but even more striking, an immensely detailed portrait of the flora and fauna contained in these four acres, which seem to expand exponentially the closer one looks. It's not just the deer, and the woodpeckers, and the bluebells: It's the six species of bats, more than 30 species of spiders, the 150 species of moths, the 300 species of fungi, the mites, the centipedes, the pseudoscorpions, the myriad things so tiny they have no English names. Fortey creates with them an astounding portrait of multilayered life in one relatively restricted space, reviving the great tradition of natural history, so cast into the shade in recent years by molecular biology and genetic studies. If it has a fault, it is that this is a book that does not really catch at the heart. Toward the end, Fortey proclaims his contempt for the emotional aspects of modern nature writing; he is inflexibly empiricist. He stands or falls by his scientific expertise, which is indeed magisterial. Although it is not quite infallible. He refers, for example, to his wood's hairy snail as Trochilus hirsutus; he should have said Trochulus hispidus (the former name refers to a South American hummingbird). Elsewhere he misquotes the name of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew - he writes "Botanical," a lapse that may seem perfectly trivial, but which would be regarded in Kew itself as most unfortunate. Yet these are trifling blemishes in an account of one small place that conveys unforgettably the staggering variety and abundance of the whole natural world. ? MICHAEL MCCARTHY is the author of "The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy."
Kirkus Review
A distinguished British paleontologist offers a meticulously compiled biography of four acres of woodland in Oxfordshire, England.In 2011, Fortey (Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants that Time Has Left Behind, 2012, etc.) became the owner of a parcel of land known as Grims Dyke Wood. Eager to recapture the wonder of childhood, he soon began keeping a journal of the diverse moods and changing seasons of a place that, from the beginning, had felt like home. Forteys more scientific aim was to understand how the natural world had come to be so varied. For a year, the author wrote a month-by-month account of the flora and fauna of Grims Dyke Wood. The book begins in April, when a sea of bluebells and other flowers began to carpet the ground in colorful splendor. As spring moved into summer, pale, smooth-barked beeches created green leafy canopies that protected a revival of insect activity. The mixture of rain with spells of hot, dry weather during the summer months created an environment that was generous in its gifts of wild cherries but also proved temporarily inhospitable to both microorganisms and small mammals. Early fall brought with it the joys of truffle and mushroom hunting. The cooler temperatures and rains of November signaled the end of reproductive cycles for spiders and other animals as well as the proliferation of unique fungi. Despite the cold and snow of winter, holly and ivy persisted and even thrived, and men came to fell trees vying for space or too sick to live. February brought a proliferation of mosses, which heralded new cycles of growth about to begin again. Replete with photographs, recipes for homemade concoctions like ground elder soup and nettle fertilizer, and side stories of the people, past and present, who impacted the wood, this book will appeal to environmentalists or anyone interested in a richly tapestried natural history of south central England. An eloquent, eccentric, and precise nature memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This thorough natural history of Grim's Dyke Wood, Oxfordshire, presents a month-by-month account of the author's investigations and reflections. Fortey, a retired museum curator, treats each bug and bulb with great care, offering descriptive and colorful observations. He also examines the social and archaeological history of the wood, noting everything from the "long view" from the first wall to the modern footpath through the wood to the local pub. Each chapter is researched and cited in the notes. VERDICT This book will appeal to English historians, naturalists, archaeologists, and countryside travelers. Those who dream of traveling or living in the English countryside will be entranced by the detail and thought, while those with little interest in the topic will soon wish to take a trip across the pond to experience these sights for themselves.-Dawn Lowe-Wincentsen, Oregon Inst. of Technology, Portland © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
1 April After a working life spent in a great museum, the time had come for me to escape into the open air. I spent years handling fossils of extinct animals; now, the inner naturalist needed to touch living animals and plants. My wife, Jackie, discovered the advertisement: a small piece of the Chiltern Hills up for sale. The proceeds from a television series proved exactly enough to purchase four acres of ancient beech-and-bluebell woodland, buried deeply inside a greater stretch of stately trees. The briefest of visits clinched the deal--exploring the wood simply felt like coming home. On 4 July 2011 "Grim's Dyke Wood" became ours. I began to keep a diary to record wildlife, and the look and feel of the woodland as it passed through diverse moods and changing seasons. I sat on one particular stump to make observations, which I wrote down in a small, leather-bound notebook. I was unconsciously compiling a biography of the wood--bio in the most exact sense, since animals and plants formed an important part of it. Before long, I saw that the story was as much about human history as it was about nature. For all its ancient lineage, the wood was shaped by human hand. I needed to explore the development of the English countryside, all the way from the Iron Age to the recent exploitation of woodland for beech furniture or tent pegs. I was moved by a compulsion to understand half-forgotten crafts and revive half-remembered words like "bodger," "spile" and "bavin." Plans were made to fell timber, to follow the journey from tree to furniture; to visit the canopy in a cherry-picker; to explore the archaeology of that ancient feature, Grim's Dyke, that ran along one side of the plot. I wanted to see if the wood could yield food as well as inspiration. My scientific soul reawakened as I sought to comprehend the ways that plants and animals collaborate to generate a rich ecology. I had to sample everything: mosses, lichens, grasses, insects and fungi. I investigated the natural history of beech, oak, ash, yew and all the other trees. I spent moonlit evenings trapping moths; daytime frolicking with nets to catch crane flies or lifting up rotten logs to understand decay. I poked and prodded and snuffled under brambles. I wanted to turn the appropriate bits of geology into tiles and glass. The wood became a route to understanding how the landscape is forever in a state of transition, for all that we think it unchanging. In short, the wood became a project. Grim's Dyke Wood is just a segment in the middle of more extensive ancient woodland, Lambridge Wood, lying in the southern part of the county of Oxfordshire. Splitting Lambridge into separate plots generated a profit for the previous owner, but also allowed people of modest means to own and care for their own small piece of living history. Our fellow "woodies"--as Jackie terms them--proved to include a well-known harpsichordist, a retired professor of business systems, a founder member of Genesis (the band, not the book), a virologist turned plant illustrator, ex-actors turned psychologists, and a woman of mystery. Our own patch is one of the smaller ones. All of the "woodies" have their own reasons for wanting to be among the trees--some desire simply to dream, some would rather like to turn a profit, others to explore sustainable resources. I believe I am the only naturalist. All the owners are there to prevent the wood from being felled or turned into housing. For the long history of Lambridge Wood tells us that our trees are less worked today than at any time in the past. This sad redundancy is no less part of its tale, as our wood is inevitably connected to the wider world of commerce and markets. The histories of my home town, Henley-on-Thames, a mile away, and the famous river on which it sits are bound into the narrative of the surrounding countryside. Ancient manors controlled the fate of woodlands for centuries. I have to imagine what the wood would have seen or heard as great events passed it by; who might have lurked under the trees, what poachers and vagabonds, poets or highwaymen. Once the project was under way a curious thing happened. I wanted to make a collection. This may not sound particularly remarkable, but for somebody who had worked for decades with rank after rank of curated collections it was rejuvenation. Life among the stacks in the Natural History Museum in London had stifled my acquisitiveness, but now something was rekindled. I wanted to collect objects from the wood, not in the systematic way of a scientist, but with something of the random joy of a young boy. Perhaps I wanted to become that boy once again. Eighteenth-century gentlemen were wont to have cabinets of curiosities in which they displayed items that might have conversational or antiquarian interest. I wanted to have my own cabinet of curiosity. I would add items when my curiosity was piqued month by month: maybe a stone, a feather or a dried plant--nothing for the eighteenth-century gent. I believe that curiosity is a most important human instinct. Curiosity is the enemy of certainty, and certainty--particularly conviction that other people are different, or sinful, or irreligious--lies behind much of the conflict and genocide that disfigure human history. If I could issue one injunction to humankind it would be: "Be curious!" My collection will be a way of encapsulating the whole Grim's Dyke Wood project: my New Curiosity Shop. And I already know that the last item to be curated will be the leather-bound notebook. The collection requires a cabinet to house it. Jackie and I plan to fell one of our cherry trees and convert it into a wonderful receptacle for the wood's serendipitous treasures. We must discuss the work with Philip Koomen, a noted Chiltern furniture-maker devoted to using local materials. Philip's workshop, Wheelers Barn, is in the remotest part of the Chiltern Hills, only about five miles from Grim's Dyke Wood as the crow flies, but about fifteen as the ancient roads wind hither and thither. His studio is imbued with calm. Polished sections through trees hanging on the walls show the qualities of each variety: colour, texture, grain and age all combine to distinguish not just different tree species, but individual personalities. No two trees are identical. Some have burrs that section into turbulent swirls. Pale ash contrasts with rich walnut, and cherry with its warm tones is satisfactorily different from oak. This is a man who cares deeply about materials and believes in the genius loci--an integration of human and natural history that lends authenticity to a hand-made item. Philip's handiwork from our own cherry tree will be a physical embodiment of our wood, but by housing the idiosyncratic collection picked up as the project develops, it will also contain the wood, as curated by this writer. It will be a cabinet of memories as much as objects. We haggle a little about design, but I know I shall rely on his judgement. I will have to be patient when I gather up the small things in the wood that take my fancy. It will be some time before the collection can live in its dedicated home. This book could be thought of as another kind of collection. Extracts from my diary describe the wood through the seasons. I follow H. E. Bates's wonderful book Through the Woods (1936) in beginning in the exuberant month of April rather than with the calendar year, and frigid January. But then, H. E. Bates himself inherited the same plan from the writer and illustrator Clare Leighton, whose intimate portrait of her own garden through the cycles of the seasons, Four Hedges,1 he much admired. My friends and colleagues come to sample and identify almost every jot and tittle of natural history that they can find. Natural history leads on to science, and the stories of grand estates, woodland skills and trades, and life along the River Thames. Human folly and natural catastrophes link the wood to a wider world beyond the trees. This complex collection explains why the wood is as it is today; its rich diversity of life is a concatenation of particular circumstances. I am trying to reason how the natural world came to be so varied, and my understanding is refracted through the lens of my own small patch. I am trying to see the wood for the trees. Bluebells Some trees stand close together, like a pair of friends huddling in mutual support. Others are almost solitary, rearing away from their fellows in the midst of a clearing. The poet Edward Thomas described "the uncounted perpendicular straight stems of beech, and yet not all quite perpendicular or quite straight."2 Each tree trunk has individuality, for all the harmony of their numbers together. One leans a little towards a weaker neighbour; another carries a scar where a branch fell long ago; this one has an extraordinarily slender elegance as it reaches for its place under the sky; that one has a stocky base, as chunky as an elephant's leg, and doubtless at least as strong. No two trees are really alike, yet their collaboration on the scale of the wider wood creates a sense of architectural design. The relatively pale and smooth beech bark helps to unite the structure, for in the early spring's soft sunshine the tree trunks shine almost silver. The natural cathedral of the wood is supported by brilliant, vertical superstructure, one that shifts subtly with the moods of the sun. It is too early in the month for many fresh beech leaves to have unfurled from their tight buds. The wood is still flooded with light. Some of the sunlight falls on the crisp, dark tan to gold-coloured leaves fallen from last year's canopy that lie in scruffy patches on the ground; stubbornly dry, they have yet to rot away. The sunshine brings the first direct heat of the year, enough to warm our cheeks with hints of seasons to come. Am I imagining that the beech trunk is actually hot on its illuminated side? It does not strain the imagination to envisage the sap rising beneath the grey-green roughened bark, rejuvenated by April showers. Where the sunlight reaches the thin soil spring flowers accept the warmth and light; briefly, it is their time to flourish. After standing to contemplate the grandeur, I now have to get down on my hands and knees to see what is happening at ground level. By the pathside are patches of heart-shaped leaves mottled with white; the sun glances off the tiny, glossy, butter-yellow petals of the lesser celandine, eight petals in a circle per flower, not unlike a child's first drawing of what every flower should be. Celandines are growing in the company of dog violets, whose flowers are as complicated as the celandine's are simple: the whole borne on an arched-over stem, carrying five blue-violet petals, of which the lowest is lip-like and marked with the most delicate dark lines converging towards the centre of the flower. At the very heart of it there is a subtle yellowing and, behind, a spur offering a treasure of nectar: clearly the whole structure is an inducement for pollinating insects--a road map promising a reward. Through the beech litter brilliant green blades of a grass, wood melick, are pushing upwards to seek their share of precious light. Near the edge of the wood, lobed leaves of ground elder form a mat of freshest green; this notorious garden weed is constrained to behave itself in the wild. But close observations of wayside flowers may be something of a distraction from a Chiltern spectacular. Perhaps I prefer to taste a few appetisers before becoming overwhelmed by the main course. For just beyond a short sward of wood melick is a shoreline edging the glory of the April beech woods in England: a sea of bluebells. The whole forest floor beyond is coloured by thousands upon thousands of flowers; a sea--because it seems unbroken and intense, like the yachted waters in a Dufy painting. But the display might equally be described as a carpet of bluebells; that word is more appropriate to the floor of a natural cathedral. Besides, the hue is a dark and rich blue, a shade not truly belonging to the ocean. Rather it is the cobalt blue of decorated tin-glazed wares produced at Delft, in Holland. In these woods, a magical slip is washed over the floor of the woodland as if by the hand of a master; a glaze that lasts only a few weeks, but transforms the ground beneath the beeches. From a distance there is a vague fuzziness about it, as if the blueness were evaporating upwards. The show is produced by massed English bluebells, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, a species unique to western Europe. This is old Britain's very own, very particular and extraordinarily beautiful celebration of early spring. There is no physical sign in our wood of the Spanish bluebell interloper Hyacinthoides hispanica, the common species in English gardens. It is a coarser plant, with a more upright spike of flowers, and generally less elegant. In many places it is hybridising with the native species. Each bluebell arises from a white bulb the size of a small tomato, and produces a rosette of spear-like leaves and a single flower spike; none is much taller than your forearm. It takes hundreds to make a splash of colour. The bells hang down in a line along the raceme in a single graceful curve. "Raceme" is scientifically correct, of course, but how I wish that we could refer to it as a "chime." Flowers at the base of the spike open first, their six delicate petals curving backward to form a skirt that curves away from the creamy anthers; it takes a while for the whole display to be over, as each flower up the spike comes to perfection one after another. With a natural variation in flowering times according to aspect and local climate, there are a few woodland nooks where bluebells open up precociously, and others where they linger longer. But wherever they bloom, theirs is a short-lived glory; and only when they are seen in numbers can the delicate perfume they produce be appreciated. As they generally reproduce from a slow multiplication of their bulbs, rather than from seed, the masses of English bluebells seen in our woods are a reliable indicator that they are of ancient origin. Hence it is likely that the flowers that delight my eyes today have been admired for centuries from the same spot near the edge of this very wood. The temptation is to pick a great bunch of blooms, but in a vase they lose vibrancy; they need a myriad companions to assert their natural magnificence. A thrush singing in mellow, repetitive phrases from deep within a holly bush adds some sort of blessing. Excerpted from The Wood for the Trees: One Man's Long View of Nature by Richard Fortey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
