Where the Apples Come From 
T.C. Smout
- Woodlands by Oliver Rackham Buy this book
- Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees by Richard Mabey Buy this book
- Wildwood: A Journey through Trees by Roger Deakin Buy this book
- The Wild Trees: What if the Last Wilderness Is above Our Heads? by Richard Preston Buy this book
Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands is Volume 100 of the New Naturalist series, started by Collins after the Second World War with the aim of making ecology accessible to the increasing numbers of people who visited the countryside and had a serious curiosity about what it contained. It included such early classics as R.S.R. Fitter on the natural history of London, and Frank Fraser Darling on the Scottish Highlands. Rackham has all their verve and learning, the same immediacy in the telling, but an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It is certainly full of opinions.
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T.C. Smout, Scotland’s Historiographer Royal, founded the Institute for Environmental History at St Andrews. His latest book, with Fiona Watson and Alan MacDonald, is A History of the Native Woodlands of Scotland, 1500-1920.
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