If books had scents, Beechcombings would bear the autumnal tang of woodland fungi and fractured timber. The place to inhale it would be under some scarred, rot-holed and pot-bellied old beech within whose lifetime, as Richard Mabey puts it, “whole civilisations may come and go”.

Like the wildwood itself, Beechcombings operates on many levels. In Mabey’s own words, it is about “the narratives of trees, the framings and attitudes we make of them”. Flowing through it is a scholarly disquisition upon the natural, political and economic histories of huge plants without which “most of the earth’s present inhabitants, ourselves included, could not survive”. But that is only the understorey. Bursting out is a leaf-storm of philosophical musings, journeys of mind and body, reflections and anecdotes that imprint the tree on human culture.

There is much about practical forestry (Mabey for many years owned and managed a beechwood), but more about the writers, thinkers and artists who have shaped our ideas of beauty. Edmund Burke, Gainsborough, Wordsworth, Rousseau, Corot, Monet, Pissaro, Cézanne, EM Forster, Paul Nash, the pagan Kenneth Grahame and The Wind in the Willows’ illustrator Ernest Shepard are among those who guide us from arcadia via utopia to the magnificent imperfection of Mabey’s own beloved Buckinghamshire.

Less predictably we find John Wesley twining beech saplings to symbolise the unity of Non-conformist and Anglican churches; Sigmund Freud opening botanists’ minds to the landscape of the unconscious; and the unfortunate Alfred Lord Tennyson and his three sisters being bankrupted after investing in a scheme for producing wood carvings by steam power. There is Gilbert White, the 18th-century clergyman and Mabey’s hero, who, among the Hampshire beechwoods, first combined scientific observation of the natural world with “a poetic vision of their significance” (an art whose finest living exponent is Mabey himself). In Mabey as in White, there are teeming populations of birds and animals, flowers and fungi, gods and demons.

Glimpsed between the trees is man himself, alternately rationalising and descending into “phantasy” – poets, charcoal burners, shipbuilders, chair bodgers, romancers, lovers, rogues and landowners. These last two are not always distinct. Mabey’s account of the enclosure of commons, and the citizens’ defence of them, is both angry and hilarious, as gripping a yarn of good and evil as anything that came out of Sherwood.

And then there is Mabey the man. We see the teenage romantic metamorphose into a serious young ecologist, and then into a well-intentioned but naive landowner “stuffed with mythical beliefs and hubris”. “If one’s evolving personal attitudes ... recapitulate historical relationships,” he writes of this time, “then I reckon I’d reached the mid-Victorian age. I’d been a make-believe (though highly practical) hunter-gatherer, a teenage animist, a young Romantic, an earnest Enlightenment naturalist. Now I was a rather bossy, propertied antiquarian who fancied himself a woodland connoisseur. What this last stage represented, I can see now, was a quest for authenticity.”

It is this quest that animates the book. If the depredations of deer, squirrels or insects in a wood count as “natural”, then why not the incursions of homo sapiens? Are we not part of nature, too? And Mabey poses a more difficult question. “Where on the naturalness scale,” he wonders, “would one place, for example, a deliberately planted native beech and a self-sown alien syca-more?” His answer is necessarily elastic. “More and more I’m inclined to view ‘naturalness’ not as a state, a place in freeze-frame, but as a process, a behavioural language, a movie. Naturalness is whatever occurs between human interventions.”

It is no accident that publication of this book coincides with the 20th anniversary of the great storm of 1987 – a cataclysm from which we learnt more about nature than from any other event in recorded history. The huge mistake after 15m trees came down was to think that something had to be done, and that only we humans could do it. We planted thousands of replacement seedlings, only to see them overwhelmed by spontaneous regrowth from the woods themselves. Mabey deplores our possessiveness of the natural world – our belief that it cannot thrive without our help. “The idea – still argued by some conservationists – that all woodlands must be managed is as arrogant and outrageous as suggesting that all wild animals should be in zoos.”

BEECHCOMBINGS: The Narratives of Trees by Richard Mabey
Chatto £20 pp273

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