The cover? I like it – clean and oaky, like a good New Zealand Chardonnay, 7 out of 10. And acorns are pretty special, and the shape of an oak leaf is handily memorable and instantly recognisable. This is especially true, but not exclusively, of aged oaks.

There really is something about oaks (of various species) that capture the imagination.

If you were to ask me which is my favourite type of tree I’d say ‘oak’, and now that I think about it a little more I’m not entirely sure why. However, the phrase I will remember forever from this book is from Oliver Racham who pointed out that two two-hundred-year-old oak trees are not equivlent to a four-hundred-year-old tree and the author exlains why. There is quite a lot of ‘a chiffchaff called’ and ‘a jay flew past’ but we don’t learn enough, for my taste, of the natural history of oak trees, and that was a little disappointing for this reader. Natural history is not the author’s strongest hand, I reckon. There is something, a lot, in here for everyone. This is a well-written book with a good mixture of information about this tree in this place, and its life and times, oak trees in general both in the UK and beyond, and in these days and ancient days, the people who care for and manage trees and something of the wildlife that depends on such trees.

Everyone seems to have had something to say about oaks, in a way that I doubt they did for ash or elm. These work well and the author did a good job of weaving them into the text in a useful and functional way. Scattered through this book are examples of oak trees cropping up in literature and myth over the centuries and back further.

Luckily, the Honeywood Oak has James Canton to speak for it. It is like an old soldier/airman/sailor, the last of its generation, once a stripling, having seen a lot of life and a lot of change, but rather reticent about talking about it. The Honywood Oak in Essex is around 800 years old (its reach back to the Magna Carta is quite a thought) and a remnant of a larger ancient oak woodland, almost all of which was felled for timber in the 1950s (and there are some gossipy tales about the motivation for that clearance). I enjoyed this book, more and more as I read through it, but, to be honest there is a little too much communing with trees and giving them a hug for my taste. I came across this book when it was reviewed by the incomparable John Riutta – it seems odd to learn of a book about an oak tree in Essex from a resident of Oregon, but there you go! And after my mention of it here on a Sunday I was most impressed that someone in Canongate had offered me a copy of the book before 10am on Monday morning.

The Literature Book by James Canton