RETURN TO MY TREES

A walk in the (Welsh) woods.

In 2020, travel and sustainability journalist Yeomans was anxious due to work stress and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, the Welsh government offered a potential reprieve, announcing plans for a National Forest, a walking and hiking path through the country similar to the Appalachian Trail in the U.S. By his own admission, the author was an unlikely candidate for nature writing, being initially inept at distinguishing different kinds of trees. But as he traversed the proposed route, circling the country roughly clockwise from Wentwood, near his home in Cardiff, he became better informed on a host of subjects. From chapter to chapter and hike to hike, he expounds on the history of the Druids and other Celtic lore; Arthurian legends; the Norman invasion; ironworks and coal mining; farming; and trees’ relationship to all of it. The author’s travels were practically defined by error and misjudgment: He got lost; discovered that paths were cut off by fences, bogs, and overgrowth; and at one point, accidentally stumbled on a shoot of the reality show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. As a writer, Yeomans is poised, merging tales of his trek’s calamities with history, folklore, dendrology, and environmental data. Throughout his travels, he has seen the woodlands treated as dumping grounds, and he balances a lament for that mistreatment with a broader call to get ahead of the climate change crisis. More personally, he comes to acknowledge the emotional healing power of forests without lapsing into New Age–speak. That plainspokenness and hard-won wisdom makes his conclusion all the stronger: “Unless we start to see trees and nature as our equal rather than something we are superior to then we are still doomed.”

An informed and affable guide to Welsh nature and history.