T.C. Smout writes:

Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands is Volume 100 of the New Naturalist series, started by Collins after the Second World War with the aim of making ecology accessible to the increasing numbers of people who visited the countryside and had a serious curiosity about what it contained. It included such early classics as R.S.R. Fitter on the natural history of London, and Frank Fraser Darling on the Scottish Highlands. Rackham has all their verve and learning, the same immediacy in the telling, but an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It is certainly full of opinions.

(LRB 29 November 2007)

For the hundredth title in Collins's 'New Naturalist' series, veteran naturalist Oliver Rackham describes with characteristic enthusiasm the history and ecology of Britain's woodlands. He writes in his foreword: 'I deal mainly in observations that do not call for specialised equipment and that any well-motivated observer can make. In this field amateurs can still do things that professionals, locked into their own ethos and culture, find difficult. I hope to inspire young readers to lay down the basis for long-term observations to be repeated in future decades.' In keeping with the tradition of the series, Woodlands is an attractive, collectable item as well as a reliable and very readable handbook.

Also available in hardback

HarperCollins | paperback 609 pp. |ISBN: 9780007202430