The Wood for the Trees
One Man's Long View of Nature
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- US$14.99
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- US$14.99
来自出版社的简介
From the author of Earth: An Intimate History, an exuberant "biography" of four acres of woodland, evoking a cosmos of living and inanimate things and imagining its millennia of existence
A few years ago, award-winning scientist Richard Fortey purchased four acres of woodland in the Chiltern Hills of Oxfordshire, England. The Wood for the Trees is the joyful, lyrical portrait of what he found there.
With one chapter for each month, we move through the seasons: tree felling in January, moth hunting in June, finding golden mushrooms in September. Fortey, along with the occasional expert friend, investigates the forest top to bottom, discovering a new species and explaining the myriad connections that tie us to nature and nature to itself. His textured, evocative prose and gentle humor illuminate the epic story of a small forest. But he doesn't stop at mere observation. The Wood for the Trees uses the forest as a springboard back through time, full of rich and unexpected tales of the people, plants, and animals that once called the land home. With Fortey's help, we come to see a universe in miniature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
