If you’re lost in the woods, ask a tree for directions

NATURE

HOW TO READ A TREE

by Tristan Goley (Scepter £22, 312 pp)

We all know that trees are a good thing – so much so that the government has pledged to plant 30,000 hectares of them every year.

Trees provide a home for wildlife, cool our cities in the summer and help reduce flooding during heavy rainfall. They also remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to oxygen.

But if you want to better understand the wonder of trees, then Tristan Gooley is the man for you. He’s such a seasoned enthusiast that when he’s stressed out with Christmas shopping, he’ll stand next to some trees, rather than looking for a nice cup of tea somewhere like the rest of us.

Usually photographed wearing an Indiana Jones-style hat, he refers to himself as a “natural navigator” and his motto is, “Nature always makes a map for us.” Everything outside is a clue and a sign.’

Trees, he says, offer all sorts of clues if you know how to read them. Want to find your way out of a dense forest? Then use them as a navigation aid.

The clues are in their height: when you’re downtown, you’re surrounded by towering trees like oaks, which grow slowly and produce thick trunks and tall canopies.

To get out of the woods, look for trees that are noticeably shorter.

These ‘pioneer trees’ such as birch, willow and alder can be found on the forest edges where they act as a wind buffer. They are fast growers, but their slimmer trunks also limit their ultimate height.

You can also use trees as a kind of compass. They grow towards the light so that they get more branches on the south side. As a tree grows, it will shed many of these branches; and when a tree loses a branch it uses resin or gum to form a seal at the junction with the trunk, creating something more like an eye.

If you see a lot of ‘eyes’ on a tree trunk, you have a marker that shows you which way is south.

You can also use trees as a kind of compass. They grow towards the light so that they get more branches on the south side. Stock image used

If you want to hear particularly good birdsong, go for holly, blackthorn, or thorny hawthorn; small birds make their home here as they provide protection from larger predators.

Do you want to locate a river? Look out for a ribbon of pale deciduous trees such as willows, alders and ash, which typically grow near the water.

Here’s a tree brainteaser. You pass a tree and see that someone has carved their initials into the bark. When you come back five years later, have those initials become unattainable?

Quite surprisingly, even though the tree itself will have grown, the graffiti will still be at the same height. Once bark has appeared, that part of the tree thickens but doesn’t get any bigger, so anything scratched into the bark will stay right where it was.

To estimate a tree’s age, look at its girth rather than its height. As trees age, their height begins to decrease, but their trunks get thicker and thicker (as do most of us).

As a rough guideline, a healthy tree will add 1 inch per year to its girth, so a 8-foot tree is about a century old.

We tend to admire trees most when they are in full leaf, but Gooley writes that one of the most exciting times to examine a tree is early in the year.

Then look closely and you’ll see flashes of pinks, reds and browns in what appears to be a bare tree; these are the first signs that the buds are swelling. Buds are a miracle of nature – last year’s energy, all wrapped up in a bundle ready to go off in the spring and release all those fresh green leaves.

Gooley is the kind of guy whose idea of ​​a fun day out is walking up and down hills and looking at tree roots.

How To Read A Tree is so packed with information that it’s a book you’re better off diving into rather than reading it all in one go, but it’s bound to give you a deeper appreciation for trees.

To understand them, Gooley writes, is to possess “extraordinary powers.” Your country walks will never be the same again.