My wife and I feel fortunate to live where we do, where the woods are accessible with paths that make it easy on aging legs – a place and a time to escape.
There are other books that carry this theme, like Thoreau’s Walden and Bill Bryson’s more recent, humorous Walk in the Woods, a story of his hiking the Appalachian Trail. Forest Walking belongs on the same shelf.
Sydney M. Williams
Forest Walking, Peter Wohlleben
June 10, 2023
“Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.”
John Muir (1838-1914)
John of the Woods: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
Edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, 1938
Most people look at a tree as a source of shade, or something to tap in the spring if a Sugar Maple, a risk to power lines in winter, or a wonder of beauty if a White Oak, Copper Beech, or Giant Sequoia. Like Thoreau, Peter Wohlleben looks deeper. In the introduction, he writes: “When I talk of the forest, I’m talking about a community. In a forest left to its own devices, trees of different ages and different species grow in the places they choose and that suit them best.” The pleasure from reading Mr. Wohlleben’s book justifies the sacrifice some conifer had to make to provide the paper on which the book is printed.
Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees (reviewed January 14, 2017), has been criticized for anthropomorphizing trees, which he delightfully does. In an interview, a few years ago, at the Yale School of Forestry, he said: “Trees have just as much character as humans do.” It is his passion for individual trees, his love for the forests he manages, and his joy in the woodlands he walks through, which suffuse his writing and causes readers to smile. To him, trees are generational: “In an intact ancient forest, huge trees shade the ground, using nearly all the sunlight that falls on their canopies to generate food to fuel their growth, while the younger trees wait patiently in the shadows below.”
With Jane Billinghurst, editor, publisher, and translator of his earlier books, Peter Wohlleben embarked on a series of hikes through several national parks in Canada and the United States: Lake Livingston State Park in Texas, Florida’s Highlands Hammock State Park, Letchworth State Park in New York, South Carolina’s Sumter National Forest, Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, and others. We are told how we can identify trees by their bark, how dead trees (“snags’) are “apartment buildings for the forest’s maintenance crews,” and the advantages of winter hiking when the woods are quiet, the hikers few, and the mosquitoes and midges “peacefully slumbering.”
Mr. Wohlleben is a lively, informative companion, as one walks through the forest. We are told that the largest fungus found so far is a honey fungus in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, spread “over three and a half square miles,” that “trees get fatter at night,” and that on “a hot day, a mature tree sucks up to 130 gallons of water from the ground.” He writes of the symbioses of nature, of predator and prey. But he adds: “To keep the forest healthy, we need to look beyond partnerships to what biologists are now calling guilds – arrangements of give-and-take that involve different winners and losers depending on the day or season but together keep the whole system running smoothly.”
This is a book of advice, with chapters titled: “Forest Activities with Children,” “Seasonal Walks,” “Comfort in the Forest,” and “Choosing Your Wardrobe.” It is a book that proves the adage: ‘learning can be fun.’ And that is why you will enjoy a stroll through the woods with Peter Wohlleben.
Becky C
Sydney Williams