Common Ground is publishing an Living with Trees as a new practical and inspirational guide to help communities care for trees and woods.
Trees and woods offer great potential for rebuilding our wider relationship with nature, reinforcing local identity and sustaining wildlife. We need more trees to lock up carbon to ameliorate the effects of climate change, to help shade our towns and cities, to bring shelter and beauty to places, and we need a national debate about how, where and when this is going to happen.
Living with Trees is a powerful call for more trees in our lives. The book will be a cornucopia of artwork, useful information, poetry and new ideas: a book that is both practical and inspirational. It aims to re-engage individuals and communities with their local trees and woods. Drawing on the many inspiring ways that people around the UK are redefining their relationship with trees and woods in the 21st century, it demonstrates how caring for trees and woods can enhance local biodiversity alongside community cohesion and well-being.
With a new foreword by Richard Mabey, the book will build upon Common Ground’s 1989 publication In a Nutshell and will form a companion volume to the successful Community Orchards Handbook, now in its second edition. The has been written by Robin Walter, a woodland officer for the Woodland Trust until 2010, and now an independent forester. He is supported in his research by David Dixon (Specialist Advisor for Plunkett Foundation’s ‘Making Local Woods Work’ project) and Neil Sinden (who wrote In A Nutshell and is Director of CPRE London). The book will be illustrated throughout with artwork from the Common Ground archive, including work by Alice Pattullo, Tom Frost, James Ravilious, Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash and Ellie Davies.
