THE GLORIOUS LIFE OF THE OAK

JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL, DOUBLEDAY, £8.99 (HB)

John Lewis-Stempel is an excellent writer. His best books – Meadowland, The Running Hare, The Wild Life – are like incantations. They urge us to look again at the landscape we know and reimagine our relationship with it.

This, however, is not one of LewisStempel’s best books. It immediately feels like a mismatch: a slender volume about the nation’s most important tree species. There are chapters on history, the life cycle of an oak, the oak in medicine, food and drink, the oak in folklore and Britain’s mightiest oaks, each of which deserves a book, rather than a few hundred words.

There are plenty of illustrations, poetry quotations and gobbets of interesting information. In the passages on the oak through the seasons, Lewis-Stempel’s nib does begin to flow: “Look at the silhouette of a winter oak in moonlight and you will see it as an arm and hand thrust up through the earth grasping for air.” He is also good on the moths, mosses, birds, lichen and fungi associated with mature oaks. If you are already steeped in the ecology and lore of our oaks, you will glean little here. If hunting a gift for an arboreal initiate, on the other hand, this may be the one. Rob Penn, author and woodsman

Eerie tales of ghosts, druids and bloodthirsty hounds abound at mystical Wistman’s Wood – a mossy woodland of dwarf oak trees on Dartmoor