Trees, Bees and Vital Pleas – 30 May 2025

Leave the Trees, Please is the polite but firm message of Benjamin Zephaniah’s picture book, published posthumously and featuring a simple poem pulsing with life. Melissa Castrillon’s illustrations are crowded with detail: amongst the oak leaves, birds flit, squirrels bound, caterpillars squirm and ladybirds pootle. Acorns abound. Grasses wave and flowers flourish about the roots.

In his book, Renaturing, James Canton demonstrates how this picture can be one we all recognise and enjoy. From planting wildflowers in a window box to creating a pond in even the smallest garden to leaving lawns unmown, he shows the difference we can make if we all act. Renaturing rather than rewilding is the idea since most of us do not own vast estates – if you do, perhaps you’ll get to share it with some wild boar in time whilst I am working on sharing my space with some pollinator-rich flowers. And this spider which seems to have joined me in working on the newsletter… How lovely to welcome nature even to my keyboard.

Perhaps my favourite thing about this book is that twenty years ago, when he bought a small field, James Canton had no idea what he was doing. It’s a relief and a delight for those of us unable to identify more than a blackberry or a sloe (and the latter only for gin-related reasons) to learn with him, through his diary entries, alongside considering the politics and social issues raised in the book.

One can honour Zephaniah’s message whilst still going hunting… Tree Hunting that is, with Paul Wood (really: Wood). In Wood’s sturdy block of a book (come and play guess how much it weighs), he has hunted, documented and celebrated one thousand trees across Britain and Ireland.

They all have names. If you’re in the shop this weekend, you will be minutes from the Clifton Enigma on Victoria Square. Beside a favourite nearby pub is the Highbury Vaults Bee-Bee Tree while down in the centre the Bristol Bridge Fig sticks two figures (‘fingers’? – Ed.) up to gravity and grows out of the wall of the Floating Dock.

The results of the hunt are a huge achievement, the photographs stunning, the maps adorable and I can’t wait to venture further afield, perhaps to meet the Pine of Guinness or Mrs Gaskell’s Mulberry.

On Monday, from within the shop, we’ll be stepping into the Amazon with Rosa Vásquez Espinoza via her book The Spirit of the Rainforest.

Rosa grew up in Peru, following her grandmother into the rainforest, discovering the medicinal qualities of plants and learning from the wisdom of birds. Her book combines her research into stingless bees and exploration of the Boiling River of the Amazon with generations of indigenous knowledge, some warnings one ought to heed alongside one’s curiosity and what it means to recognise that everything is alive.

We only have a few spaces left at the event so please do reply if you would like to come along. Drinks will be provided. Ayahuasca will not…

Questions around the right to life and to what that right applies are at the heart also of A Barrister for the Earth by Monica Feria-Tinta, which I am excited to read. From the Salween River in Myanmar to the sinking archipelago of the Torres Strait, from an oil spill in West Timor to a tree in Essex, Monica Feria-Tinta’s work across the world has initiated major changes in how the law is used to fight climate breakdown.

Advocating for the Earth through poetry, Jen Hadfield’s Selected Poems bubbles with her love of the landscapes she watches so closely and her part in them, as well as simmering with a hatred for strimmers… ‘Avenue Zero’ rebukes us marvellously, ‘We build where skunk cabbage flowered in April. / We build where Dutch farmers once / cut drooling daffodils, and their spittle whirled / on the wind like lassos…’

Alongside Hadfield’s poetry I have been basking in Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt, a wonderfully tragic love story set in an invented and wholly real English village and its rural surroundings. Hewitt’s quiet yet resounding descriptions of the landscape and the ways in which the main character notices and responds to it, depending on his mood, are beautiful.

The clear map of the imagined setting which unfolds over the course of the novel is reminiscent of Hardy but I had better check – bear with me while I abandon other plans and return to The Return of the Native, one of many favourites.

Young ecologists, advocates, scientists, artists and poets will all love Life. By which I mean Jennifer N.R. Smith’s luxurious book about biodiversity, introducing the sheer variety of life on earth, how everything from the huge to the microscopic interacts, the vast diversity within species, not to mention mutation in starlings, developments in medicine, and how all of this relates to that chocolate bar some of us are currently craving.

Jennifer has kindly decorated our window in honour of this gorgeous book. Do come and meet the flamingo now befriending our heron and peruse her books – Glow and Bang are part of the same series and she has also illustrated David Attenborough and Colin Butfield’s Ocean.

With thanks to Dwell by Simon Armitage, I shall leave you with some reviews from the residents of an insect hotel:
‘Creepy.’
‘Lousy.’
‘Amazing Beetles tribute band in the function room.’
‘Left my shoes outside my room and in the morning they’d been properly cleaned and polished. Thank you a hundred times over. You made this centipede very happy.’

May your weekend be wooded with trees, wild with flowers and bursting with Life,  
Lizzie