Caught by the River

National Tree Week

27th November 2018

This week is National Tree Week – the UK’s largest annual tree celebration, which coincides with the start of the winter tree planting season (November to March each year). The Tree Council, one of the UK’s leading charities for trees, first established National Tree Week in March 1975 in response to the national replanting required after the outbreak of Dutch Elm disease. You can find out more about National Tree Week and associated country-wide events here.

To celebrate, we’ve pulled together a collection of arboreal odds and ends – from current exhibitions to gems from the CBTR archive – which we think you’ll enjoy:

A good place to start is here – Andy Childs’ recent review of Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which Jeff recently declared his favourite book of 2018. High praise.

Back in April, our friend David Chatton Barker (whose name will be familiar to fans Folklore Tapes) asked for help in spreading the word about the effort to raise funds for the creation of new woodland and hedgerows in Whitworth, Rossendale. We’re very pleased to see that the project reached its target!

We’d like to take this chance to pester the BBC to get Roger Deakin’s Wildwood series back up on iPlayer Radio.

From Mark Frith’s ‘A Legacy of Anicent Oaks’

We highly recommend a trip to see Mark Frith’s ‘A Legacy of Ancient Oaks’, which showcases the architectural beauty of tree trunks, bark and branches in winter. The portraits are on display at Kew Gardens until March 2019.

Revisit Emma Warren’s review of Fiona Stafford’s The Long, Long Life of Trees, a former Caught by the River Book of the Month.

And if that doesn’t quite scratch your leafy itch, we have an array of related reading options available in our shop at the moment, including Luke Turner’s Out of the Woods – a memoir about sexuality, shame and the lure of the trees – which is available to preorder. There’s plenty more from the archive to be found under our #trees tag too.