Underland

Robert Macfarlane's Underland¹ is already one of my favourite reads of the year and I'm only about a third of the way through it.

He speaks about his experiences with such romanticism and I've been adoring the references throughout. The same was true for The Old Ways, which I read earlier this year. Here's one of my favourite passages—and an quote from Louis de Bernières—for your enjoyment and my future reference:

Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these aboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into the old age: 'we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.'

1. Robert Macfarlane, Underland ↗, Hamish Hamilton, 2019