This is the season for trees – and for lovers of trees. If pockets crammed with conkers and cones have room for books, then these are the three to take into the woods.

Richard Mabey’s Beechcombings: The Narrative of Trees (Chatto £20) begins with the great storm of 1987, when 15m trees were toppled in five hours. The storm upturned deep-rooted expectations about the ways trees behave. Where we did our clumsy best to help, stunted saplings continue to struggle. Where the wreckage was left to its own devices, new trees have sprung from the carcasses. “No-one expects gratitude from trees,” observes Mabey drily, “but it was a shock to realise how contrary they could be, how easily they slipped out of the models and images we’ve made of them.” Mabey is a superb naturalist, but this is far more than natural history: it’s history, art, memoir and, occasionally, poetry.

In the same spirit, Roger Deakin’s Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (Hamish Hamilton £20) celebrates the changing relationship between man and woods. Deakin travelled widely – from the wild apple groves of Kazakhstan to the Australian outback – and finished this book shortly before his death. His bereaved disciples included Robert Macfarlane, whose own stunning quest narrative, The Wild Places (Granta £18.99), ranges far beyond woodland, into moor, meadow and mountain summit. Eloquent and perceptive, this is nature writing of the highest order.

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