This book occupies the dry valley between popular science books and works of scholarship. It depends rather heavily on a knowledge of the geography, terrain, and topography of the British Isles, which I lack. And it can sometimes be hard to tell the point towards which Rackham is driving. So at 18% in, I give up. I'm just not enjoying it. ( )

Oh dammit. I just finished this. I had no idea that after 77% it would be the footnotes etc. This fascinating, beautifully written, witty book about British woods has been part of my morning, specifically that little read before coffee while I'm enjoying my still warm covers, for about a year now.
British woods are small worlds with fascinating all kinds of fascinating interlocking ecologies. The Quebec woods have all that too, but half an hour north, it gets vast and boreal pretty fast. My eldest daughter has seen it all the way up to the transitional forest before the tundra. She took a school trip to La Baie James. I still remember poring over her photos from a Kodak disposable camera of bottle-brush conifers getting smaller and smaller, until it seemed they could barely scrub out a wine decanter. We waste our woods too because we think they're infinite like the buffalo of the Great Plains.
I used to wonder what it would be like to look at a room and see a history of who was ever there, and what went on it. Such thoughts come when living an old house (young by British standards). Oliver Rackham is one of those people who can do that with woods. There is a lot of history in this book but not the usual kind to do with battles to do with ownership, usage, the introduction of non-native trees, fashions in conservation. And there are maps, some of them older than cathedrals that show individual trees. His example photos are from everywhere. I liked that. It reminded me how these individual woods belonged to the whole. I am also less worried about my silver maple after reading about the long cycles of woods and how trees handle different kinds of stress. Old silver maple has had a few dry years. My ash trees however, are likely doomed. The ash borer is here (globalization of pest species; when they travel, the things that eat them and keep them under control don't travel with them).
My only regret was that I got this in ebook form. The paper copy was pricey and hard to find and there it was, instant read in the dark gratification, but this is really a book I'd like be able to pull from the shelf and leaf through. I'm going to look for a paper copy.
There's an old parking lot in Lachine by some abandoned property where the grass is growing through the asphalt and lately, the beginnings of trees.
"The easiest way to create a new wood is do nothing." ( )

Woodlands is a fascinating, albeit specialised, read. After the introductory chapter, chapter two appropriately starts at the bottom with the essentials, roots and makes very interesting reading; but some of the subsequent chapters are rather more specialised, for example Pollen Analysis and Woodland. Other chapter titles include: Archives of Woodland and How to Study Them; Archaeology and Land-Forms of Woodland and Wood-Pasture; Uses of Wood and Timber . . . ; Ancient Woodland Plants and Other Creatures; Environment, Pathology and Ecology . . . ; Modern Forestry . . . ; and Experiments and Long-Terms Observations are just a few of the twenty two chapters. It is packed with information both specific and incidental to woodlands. The book includes, in addition to References, a Bibliography, Tables and a comprehensive Index.

The book is illustrated, the illustrations grouped in signatures spaced throughout the book, four in all containing over 200 photographs, maps and diagrams, predominately in colour. With two or more pictures to a page they tend necessarily to be rather small, adding to the impression, along with the small type and densely packed pages, that this a studios work and certainly not a picture book!

While Rackham writes essentially about British woodland, he makes it clear that much of what he has to say can be applied to other countries. ( )

100th volume in the New Naturalist library