What a book! Delightful, beautiful, heartbreaking. I loved the balance of beautiful writing about nature with the stories of the people who made the woods their home. The stories had a cyclical nature, where different characters and plot lines looped back on themselves and you could see connections across the generations.
My favorites included Osgood, the apple enthusiast who planted an orchard but couldn’t escape the Revolutionary War:
Concerning My Decision to Go to War (or, a Lamentation on the Brevity of the Life of Man Compared to That of His Trees)
…
if one finds no mention of Politics in these pages, no Acts, no Dates and Declarations, it is because this is a History of Trees, not Men. That is, it was. But now the pitch has risen so that even deep within my woods I hear it.
And Nora, a modern-day grad student who loves the ecology of the forest:
She felt as if she had fallen in love with someone only to learn that they were dying. She could recall the winter day in the forest outside the library at Amherst when she first began to sense the possibility of an enchantment. And a decade had passed, and every day she’d felt the wonder grow deeper, and every day, reading the journals, attending conferences, she found herself confronted by the mounting evidence that she was losing the very thing that had saved her.
…she realized she had never really grasped how astonishing these forests were.
Truly a wonderful book.
