Let nature take its course

A second major storm followed in January 1990. Together, they changed our whole perception of the stability of woods and trees. "The physical loss of the trees was matched by the injury to our complacency, the denting of our sense of the proper order of things.

This wasn't what was supposed to have happened. Trees were monuments to security, emblems of continuity and peace in an unstable world," says Richard Mabey. We had to learn to accept that natural disturbance is part of the life of woods and that for us to attempt to manage it may not be the best response.

Mabey has taken the anniversary of the Great Storm as the frame for this superb history of our changing attitudes to trees, which he has brought Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees by Richard Mabey into focus by concentrating on his favourite, the beech, an attachment that began in his childhood in the Chilterns.

The beech, he says, is "a fascinatingly awkward tree", shallow-rooted, shady, "unpredictable, possessive, prone to catastrophes", and now under some threat from climate change. The beech's life, he says, is "more a matter of conjuring with light and water than dependence on the earth".

Beechcombings is at once a broadly chronological survey of changing attitudes to trees in general and of Mabey's own evolving relationships with them, fruitfully mingling cultural and natural history with elements of autobiography in a way that others have now emulated but he made his own. Anybody who has consulted his great reference Flora Britannica or read his memoir Nature Cure will know Mabey as a writer to cherish. He's equally good at close description "a full-grown tree is a catacomb of reticulations, rot-holes, snags, fissures", he notes and sweeping speculation: "Trees historically have been a challenge to humankind. They are monumental, long-lived, stubborn, territorially ambitious." He himself identifies his overriding theme here as the quest for "some ideal tree, the original beech, the perfectly productive beechwood, the model of beauty, the natural beech". But, as he surveys its course the development of ideas of the picturesque, recounts his growing realisation that the beechwood he once owned "went off on its own project, regardless of what we did", and recoils from the terrible story of the mania for coniferous plantations that raged around the country between the 1950s and the 1980s, a slightly different emphasis emerges.

Mabey has come to doubt the value of planting woodland trees at all, as compared to letting them arise as they will. For several centuries now, people have "deployed trees across the landscape as if they were incapable of doing it themselves".

In the Seventies, there were well-meaning tree-planting campaigns all over the country, often recruiting children. "Tree-planting was to become the great ritual of atonement, the way of making painless amends for the devastation our species had wreaked across the planet." But somehow these schemes ignored the fact that trees have their own reproductive systems and can "produce new generations entirely of their own accord, just as they have done in Britain since the last Ice Age." It is all too easy to assume that nature cannot thrive without our help. Sometimes we should just be witnesses, not managers. Trees are, in fact, irrepressible and grow most truly themselves when self-sprung. The Great Storm "left ramshackle, rot-riddled veterans intact, and levelled in their millions the youthful, the fastidiously planted, the lovingly tended and the totally healthy." Mabey even believes that when it comes to climate change, we should not interfere. He has seen beeches surviving in improbable environments, on "windracked, snow-covered Mont Ventoux", for example, and believes them to have "powers of survival we've scarcely begun to understand".

For Mabey, recognising that we should enter into a different, less assertive relationship with trees is part of a new sense of our overall place in the world, abandoning dominance. Allowing trees their chance is, he says, "a moral issue". This wonderful book, put alongside those recently published by Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane, suggests that these days nature writing might just be a more rewarding genre than literary fiction.