The Oak Papers

Book excerpt: 'Some five years ago, I sought solace from the ways of the world by stepping into the embrace of an ancient oak tree . . . From the first meeting, there grew a strange sense of attachment I did not consciously recognise until I later began to realise the significance that trees, and oak trees especially, can have in our lives.’ James Canton spent two years sitting with and studying the Honywood Oak. A colossus of a tree, it would have been a sapling when Magna Carta was signed. Initially visiting the tree for escape and solitude, in time he learns to study it more closely. He examines how our long-standing dependency on oak trees has developed and morphed into myth and legend. The Oak Papers is a stunning, meditative and healing book about the lessons we can learn from the natural world, if only we slow down enough to listen.