The wood and the trees

Sometimes a series of stimulating reviews prompts me to buy a book I would not normally think of reading.

One recent example is Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees, by Richard Mabey (Chatto and Windus 2007). The book is what it says on the cover, an exploration of trees and woodlands with a particular focus on the beech tree.

Its resonance with the work and thinking of the Institute is remarkable.

Mabey notes that when faced with an ancient tree people generally ask “when was it planted?”; the notion that trees can “plant” themselves seemingly inconceivable.

He explores the importance of boundaries, quoting a Victorian writer G E Briscoe Eyre who wrote: “The slopes that connect the moorland with the timbered lowland partake of the vegetation of both, and form a debatable land (Mabey’s emphasis) between them, where descending tongues of heath interpenetrate the advancing wedges of rough woodland.”

That immediately prompted me to think about D W Winnicott’s concept of potential space.

Mabey also explores notions of beauty and complexity. He writes:”I’m fascinated by this apparent congruence between the judgement of aesthetic philosophers and the way scientists describe and categorise natural landscapes. Are there deeper roots to our emotional responses to the visual….? What resonances, for example, do ‘picturesque’ trees call up? …. Where did the notion that they were picturesquely beautiful emerge from? What deep-rooted associations do trees conjure up? Are they some kind of portal to understanding the deep relationship between wildness and time?”

One thing the reviews did not alert me to were a number of links links between beechcombing and psychodynamics.

Mabey notes that one famous botanist Sir Arthur Tansley devoted four years of his life to psychoanalysis. While another, George Peterken, was also interested in the work of Freud and discovered the following quote from his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:
“The creation of the mental domain of phantasy has a complete counterpart in the establishment of ‘reservations’ and ‘nature parks’ in places where the inroads of agriculture, traffic or industry threaten to change the original face of the earth into something unrecognisable. The reservation is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else…The mental realm of phantasy is also such a reservation from the encroaches of reality.”

A fertile read.

Phil Swann