Where the Apples Come From

T.C. Smout

• BuyWoodlands by Oliver Rackham
  Collins, 609 pp, £25.00, September 2006, ISBN 0 00 720243 1
• BuyBeechcombings: The Narratives of Trees by Richard Mabey
  Chatto, 289 pp, £20.00, October 2007, ISBN 978 1 85619 733 5
• BuyWildwood: A Journey through Trees by Roger Deakin
  Hamish Hamilton, 391 pp, £20.00, May 2007, ISBN 978 0 241 14184 7
• BuyThe Wild Trees: What if the Last Wilderness Is above Our Heads? by Richard Preston
  Allen Lane, 294 pp, £20.00, August 2007, ISBN 978 1 84614 023 5

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.