A beautifully paced and structured exploration of the relationship between trees (more specifically woodland) and the culture we live with. The author is well read, lyrical, whimsical- with an eye for judicious quotations as much as for the trees that make this book (and the making is not unconscious: Fiennes knows how commercial interest can destroy or promote woodland). He is keenly aware of our behaviour: “Most of the time people hesitate on the edges of woods; there’s always at the very least a flicker of a moment when we pause and gather ourselves...” and his reading (lightly introduced) goes from Ovid to (of course) Kipling. He mirrors Macfarlane and Morris in his lament for how “we won’t see what’s no longer there: the butterflies and birds, the lynx and the boar, the orchids, the fungi and, of course, the people...I wonder...if we are now more ignorant about the hidden lives of trees than our Iron Age ancestors ever were.” Fiennes ably contributes to the redressing of that balance.