GHOST TREES

BOB GILBERT, SARABAND, £14.99 (HB)

Trees, by far the most dominant living organisms in any rural vista, nevertheless have equal impact in the city, even when they are no longer there and all that remains are memories in the landscape.

Honor Oak, Forest Hill, Falconwood, St John’s Wood, Woodford, Burnt Ash – London is a city of trees. The ghosts of Gilbert’s easy, lyrical and beautifully evocative text include the black poplars that no longer occur in the East London parish of Poplar that took their name, when this was a land of marshes and damp grazing meadows. Going (literally) round the mulberry bush, dowsing for a lost river using hazel rods, contemplating the oft-reputed smut-hardiness of the London plane, he takes us on a grand tour of the borough’s history and natural history.

In a language as rich and lilting as the contours of the estuarine land, we are transported across its disguised but not-yet-quite eradicated medieval farmscapes, the early ripe-smelling commercial industries of tannery, brewery and dog-biscuit factory, and the Dickensian mud of the ever-present Thames wateriness. A delight. Richard Jones, entomologist and author