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Channel: Oliver Rackham – The Spectator
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Trees with personality

The English have loved ancient trees for centuries, have celebrated them in story and poetry, have given them names, sung songs and danced dances in their honour, have invested them with railings,...

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All roots and branches

This book covers all the trees that now live or have ever lived: what they are, how they function, how they grow, their relation to environment, plants, animals, and the human species. It is full of...

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Child of the New Forest

Roger Deakin was a swimmer, old-fashioned socialist, carpenter, broadcaster, tree-planter, chair-bodger, ‘quasi-hippie’, art critic, naturalist, Cambridge graduate, traveller, north-east Suffolk man,...

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Long live the weeds and the wilderness

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane Robert Macfarlane is a Cambridge don, Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, with an artistic eye for wild and lonely places. He was a friend and follower of Roger...

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Animals without Backbones

What is a Bug? For this book, any animal that is not a Beast: the whole invertebrate realm, from the humble amoeba, through insects (more than half the book), to octopuses and sea-squirts (the distant...

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Seeing the wood from the trees

This book is a work of art by an artistic photographer. It deals mainly with a large minority of the world’s trees whose bark, as the trunk expands, peels off in pretty patterns: snake-bark maples,...

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Leaves on the line

What is happening to trees in Britain? Horse chestnuts now turn brown in July. A microscopic caterpillar eats out the green insides of the leaves; only the outer skins remain. Horse chestnuts also weep...

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Of knowledge, life, good and evil

The British Museum contains more about trees than one might expect: trees in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and all kinds of small artefacts of wood and bark. Frances Carey, sometime Deputy Keeper of...

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Each peach, pear, plum . . .

Elias Ashmole, fortune-hunter, scholar and collector, bequeathed his coins, curiosities and books in 1692 to form the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The books were later taken over by the...

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Seeds of doubt

Remember the ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’ campaign? Forty years on, has anyone inquired into what happened to all those trees and how many are still alive? Since then, planting amenity trees has grown into an...

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Blood at the root

John Evelyn (1620–1706) was not only a diarist. He was one of the most learned men of his time: traveller, politician, town-planner, artist, numismatist, gardener and opponent of air pollution. He was...

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All roots and branches

This book covers all the trees that now live or have ever lived: what they are, how they function, how…

View Article

Child of the New Forest

Roger Deakin was a swimmer, old-fashioned socialist, carpenter, broadcaster, tree-planter, chair-bodger, ‘quasi-hippie’, art critic, naturalist, Cambridge graduate, traveller, north-east Suffolk…

View Article


Long live the weeds and the wilderness

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane Robert Macfarlane is a Cambridge don, Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, with an…

View Article

Animals without Backbones

What is a Bug? For this book, any animal that is not a Beast: the whole invertebrate realm, from the…

View Article


Seeing the wood from the trees

This book is a work of art by an artistic photographer. It deals mainly with a large minority of the…

View Article

Leaves on the line

What is happening to trees in Britain? Horse chestnuts now turn brown in July. A microscopic caterpillar eats out the…

View Article


Of knowledge, life, good and evil

The British Museum contains more about trees than one might expect: trees in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and all kinds of…

View Article

Each peach, pear, plum . . .

Elias Ashmole, fortune-hunter, scholar and collector, bequeathed his coins, curiosities and books in 1692 to form the nucleus of the…

View Article

Seeds of doubt

Remember the ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’ campaign? Forty years on, has anyone inquired into what happened to all those…

View Article
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