BOOK
WINDBLOWN
On the night of 15 October 1987, a storm of such magnitude swept across the south and east of England that 18 lives were lost and an estimated 15 million trees destroyed, including six of the seven ancient oaks at Sevenoaks and hundreds of historic specimens at Kew Gardens. Almost 30 years later, Tamsin Treverton Jones is rummaging through paintings by her late father, the artist Terry Thomas, when she finds a photograph of a mural he’d designed for Kew to commemorate the Great Storm.
This prompts Treverton Jones to set out on a personal journey, driven by the deeply felt loss of her father and the loss brought about by the raging storm in his mural. Having inherited her father’s artistic eye, she creates a vivid montage of portraits, from the ship’s captain, lighthouse keeper, fruit farmer and fisherman to the vagabond, all caught up in a savage act of nature.
Treverton Jones has a knack for storytelling, effortlessly leading the reader through the tales of devastation. The accounts are heart-breaking, but this is a tale not without hope: on her journey of discovery she learns that nature has a way of revitalising itself. In woodlands where fallen trees have been left undisturbed, sunlight streams through the gaps, allowing saplings to take root, with a host of rarer fungi and insects feeding off the rotting logs. “Perhaps,” she concludes, “I have always known that the way to live within the landscape is to walk alongside it, treat it with wonder and compassion.” Helen Moat, travel writer