This month’s Idler Book Club choice is Nina Lyon’s brilliant new book Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man, published this week by Faber. Book Club Subscribers will be receiving their copy, along with a letter from Nina, in the post over the coming days. Below is an extract from the book, with a few words from Nina to introduce it.

“One of the first things I did when writing Uprooted was track down a local shaman. This was surprisingly easy: shamanism is a bit of a boom industry at the moment and I live in a deeply hippyish part of Mid Wales, near Hay-on-Wye, and it turned out there was someone twenty minutes away. I had never set out to be a nature writer and had no previous expertise on the Green Man, so I needed help fast. The aim was to learn to connect with trees and do some shamanic journeying, where you enter a sort of trance state, in the hope of finding the Green Man in the spirit realm.”

Extract: ‘The Shaman’, Uprooted pp. 131-133

I was supposed to be engaging with the hawthorn. I had always been a bit dismissive of hawthorn, which is unlovely in the winter, and the winters are long round here. I suppose I would have characterised it, if we’re being anthropomorphic, as a scrubby urchin-ratboy, male and small and scrawny, and now in full May its leaves were green, plump and perfect, and its blossom flirtatious like a girl after a couple of glasses of wine. It looked as though it was having fun, as if every little pearl of blossom, the little virgin balls and the full-bloom flowers with their dark stamen and pink-flecked petals, were all out partying at the Hawthorn May Ball. S asked me how I was doing and I communicated this to her; she approved. We moved on to the witch elm, which was smaller and different from the dead, big elms we used to have. Its leaves were slightly furry. I was unmoved by it.

The river, which was not the Usk but a tributary of it, was so clear that you could see the stony bed and individual bubbles of water as they came up from it. We made our way along it to a huge old oak, reddish leaves emerging. We approached the field of the tree, which is something like its aura or perhaps its sphere of influence, palms outstretched in an inverted sun salutation, which was the courteous way in. It seemed as though the tree was OK with this.

Dozing beneath an oak tree in the month of May had always been fast-track to fairyland in what little I recollected from Middle English. I was close to dozing now, and in danger of not waking up, and so found only generic things to think about it: things like its solidity and heft and age. Perhaps I should have slept, and magic would have happened. I did not feel familiar with this tree, although it was benevolent.

There is only one tree with which I could claim to have much of a relationship, a vast and ancient oak up on H’s hillside, where I lived for several years. It has been estimated to be nearly a thousand years old, a millennium in which a house and then a hamlet were built beneath it, and through which generations of a sprawling family were born, and loved, and died; it saw a school open and close and fall into ruin, and the place rebuilt by successive new owners who were not from there. When we rebuilt the barn beneath it and had to dig close to its roots I had felt fiercely protective over it as I am on occasion with my children, although it could hardly be said to be like a child. It is still there. It seems happy enough – since I have known it, for about twelve years, it has had one old branch that is black and leafless and one that is younger and new and doing just fine.

I would hug this tree spontaneously, as would my son, but he was a shaman anyway in the way that all children are, with the fanciful possibility of things still untrampled by adult sensibilities. The old oak tree will outlive his children’s children. I thought I would repeat the exercise alone, with the old oak and the unimposed intimacy that comes from having been around something for a while.

ENDS