My hero: Oliver Rackham by Richard Mabey

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/21/my-hero-oliver-rackham-richard-mabey

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I first saw Oliver Rackham perform in 1973, at a cross-disciplinary conference on the British oak held that autumn in Sussex University. We were at the dark heart of what Oliver was later to call “the locust years” (he loved a good epigram) when the forestry sector was trashing native woodland, and the subtext of the conference was a subtly orchestrated counter-attack by British ecologists, a bid to rehabilitate the national tree. Oliver was their secret weapon. He appeared on the platform looking so much the eccentric young don (he had one elbow of his coat darned red, the other green) and the power of what he delivered was stunning. He dismembered myths, caught erstwhile authorities with their factual trousers down, gave a glimpse of a community history lived not apart from trees but with them. He had measured the timber in old Suffolk houses and found the woods they were built from. He knew, first-hand, how woods worked, and that oak had been part of a different culture of woodmanship, based on natural regeneration, not industrial planting.

That appearance set out the preoccupations he was to explore in a dozen magnificent books. No one had a more crucial impact on a whole generation’s ideas about ecology and history. For Oliver, woods weren’t abstract entities; they were symbiotic networks of carpenters, beetles, deer, land-thieves, lichens, pollards, surveyors and toadstools. I once drove him from Stowmarket to Cambridge, a journey that should have taken about an hour. It took three, as he showed me a wood with five-leaved herb paris and a landscape in which he knew every hedge.

He excoriated generalisations and what he called “factoids” (eg that building the Tudor navy destroyed our oakwoods) in elegant English that had its roots in the precision of Gilbert White and the robustness of William Cobbett. He had little truck with the self-centredness of modern nature writers, but we are all in his debt.