In the beginning, there was a conker. Levison Wood picked up the horse chestnut seed one day while looking for a winner, aged ten, for a playground competition. It was so beautiful that his father urged him to plant it instead. By his teens it was a sapling. Later the young army captain would return to his parents’ garden, and there would be his champion, unfurling its leaves. Three decades later, having walked the length of the Nile, the Himalayas and the Americas, making his name as a travel writer, his tree was 20ft tall.
“I felt a deep-rooted connectedness to my tree,” says Wood, 42. As a child he had read The Jungle Book and thought the rainforest was about jaguars, parrots and monkeys. “But of course it all comes back to the trees,” he says. “I realised that when I watched Gladiator, that line of cypress, quietly waiting, is when Maximus knows he is back home. I feel the same about my chestnut. Trees are our arboreal cousins. They are family.”
The explorer is sitting under a fig tree in Arequipa in Peru, having just finished his latest adventure: The Great Tree Story. “I’ve travelled the world for 15 years in the army and as a writer, the trees have always been in the background providing shelter and shade,” he says. “Then there’s my name, which is weirdly apposite. I knew I wanted to write about woods and jungles, our symbiotic relationship with trees, and to remind ourselves that we are all creatures of the forest. We all breathe, communicate and respond to our environment.”
First the Afghanistan veteran went in search of the oldest tree, Methuselah, which predates the pyramids of Giza and Alexander the Great. “I’m not sure I found it but in a beautiful environment only hours from Los Angeles lies a valley of bristlecone pines, their boughs withered and snake-like, which have been there millennia,” he says. There is also the 5,000-year-old Llangernyw yew in Wales and the 7,000-year-old Jomon Sugi cedar tree in Japan. The oldest tree fossils have just been discovered near Butlin’s in Minehead, which pre-date the dinosaurs by millions of years, he writes. “Trees have been the spectators of the changing of climates and at the birth of thousands of species.”
Every culture and religion has a tale about a tree of life, he suggests. They have been intertwined in our history since the beginning of humanity. “The yews were planted and worshipped before the churches that were built beside them by the Celts and Saxons. Then there’s Adam and Eve and the apple tree and the idea that we were once in harmony with nature until we were cast out of the Garden of Eden.” The book is filled with arboreal tales, from Homer and the Iliad to the Buddhists with their Bodhi tree. But in the 20th century we lost some of our connection. “Tolkien was one of the few to understand their extraordinary significance, wisdom and longevity with his mighty Ents [the giant tree creatures in the Lord of the Rings trilogy].”
When Wood visited them in 2019, the Amazon rainforests inspired and devastated him as he encountered many of their 80,000 species. “They have witnessed their greatest loss of trees since the Ice Age in the last 70 years — 23 million more hectares have gone in the last five years alone,” he says.
The people he meets are as fascinating as the trees. Benki Piyako, a spiritual leader of the Ashaninka people, had planted two million trees to preserve his village culture. “We are the trees, and they are us,” he told Wood. Last year the saplings were destroyed by illegal loggers.
This ancient partnership, Wood explains, dates back to the prehistoric nomads. In western Asia, the word for tree was doru, meaning to be firm, unwavering and honest, and in Old English it was treow, truth. “Trees respond to sunlight and temperature, seasons, chemicals and vibrations, and communicate with each other, with the help of fungi,” he says. “They help each other survive and thrive.”
They are our ecological engineers, Wood believes: “They stabilise climates and provide habitats.” Recognising the sophisticated ways in which trees interact with their environment should transform our approach from one of exploitation to one of respect and collaboration.
Having served with Prince Harry and had tea with King Charles, he admires the King for admitting to giving a branch a friendly shake. “He was an early champion, along with those tree-hugger hippies,” Wood says. “We now know that trees talk to each other. Why shouldn’t we talk to them? If you hug a tree after reading this book I feel I’ve done my job.”
The British are still innately drawn to trees, he says. “There was a great outpouring of grief after the Sycamore Gap tree was cut down but this green and pleasant land is unnatural. We shouldn’t have fields empty of trees and devoid of hedgerows. In the 1980s I remember so many insects, now they’ve disappeared. You don’t get that in Peru,” he says, “but that’s because they don’t use pesticides.”
Unlike some in the tree world, he doesn’t worry whether the species now planted are native or non-native on this island. “Frankly the way climate change is happening we are going to be growing more olives and lemons quite quickly. The giant redwoods and sequoias are already thriving in the UK — that would beggar belief 150 years ago. There are only 80,000 left in California but half a million now in the UK, first introduced by explorers.”
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He doesn’t believe the Victorian plant hunters were wrong to introduce new species. “I love our current diversity and it all happened in a couple of hundred years. There were no trees here after the Ice Age and for a long time very few, so it’s interesting to diversify as long as you are not bringing in diseased imports.”
Nature is a balm; forest bathing and walking in the woods all help mental health. Streets with trees are less likely to have violence, trees in airports relax travellers. The word “conspire” means to breathe together and trees, in their efforts to photosynthesise and grow, absorb carbon dioxide and expel oxygen, which animals breathe in. “We have evolved to support each other. A sweet chestnut at Winkworth Arboretum which I visited protects thousands of species: aphids, beetles, bats, woodpeckers, fungi and moss. Trees are ecologically altruistic.”
Wood admits that all the touchy-feely stuff is not very army. “The military is a good example of people who spend a lot of time outdoors and maybe forget to appreciate nature but we are very connected to the ground when we’re in the mud, it’s the city dwellers in offices who need to be given the tools to access nature.”
The most remarkable story in the book is about Ukraine. “To see trees surrounded by craters, sewage, contamination, fire, and they are still standing — that gives you hope,” he says. He meets a man captured by the Russians while trying to protect Ukraine’s newest national park. “He escaped having dug his own grave and is determined to return. That’s how obsessed he is with his trees.”
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Wood’s journeys have taken him from Botswana to Iraq, into myriad conflict zones and the most inaccessible deserts and jungles. The teachers’ son from Stoke-on-Trent, who made the money for his first trip flipping burgers at McDonald’s at Alton Towers before studying history at Nottingham University, has lived his teenage dream of exploration but is increasingly drawn to environmental issues. Does he worry that he is constantly jetting around the world for his travels? Flying pales into insignificance compared to some activities, he replies.
“It’s necessary to share these stories but I try not to overdo it,” he says. “I don’t go on jollies now for the sake of it; I’m always cognisant of why I am doing something, and whether the local people want me and how we can apply some of their lessons to our lifestyles. It’s all very well looking at the locals and saying, ‘Aren’t they wonderful in their feather headdresses?’ but it’s important to take their indigenous wisdom and look at our ties to our land and whether we are getting it right.”
He increasingly feels the need to “reconnect with our own history”. Wood loves going to the winter solstice at Stonehenge and to National Trust properties. “There is nothing to be embarrassed about being British or ashamed — there are parts we should celebrate. It’s unfortunate that we have a hairshirt mentality: we have to punish ourselves over every little thing about our history and empire. Empires around the world have done terrible things. It’s about understanding the consequences of our past actions but being OK about that and focusing on the good that’s happening and the positive aspects of our heroes too. Shakespeare did a great job of connecting people to nature.”
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The trees can’t talk for themselves so we should tell their stories, he suggests. “But I’m sure that AI will one day decipher what they are saying. One of the most powerful experiences of my life was taking [the hallucinogenic] ayahuasca in Brazil and understanding a little bit of what the trees were saying while on that. I felt the trees talk to me, telling me to spread the word. Indigenous communities for thousands of years have been communicating with nature through these plants.”
The tree is the hero in his book. “It must go through the dark night of the soul and have its challenges but I needed to end with a glimmer of hope to make readers feel empowered. Trees will be fine but we need to remember we need trees more than they need us.”
Wood lives in a flat in London but surely the explorer is more suited to the countryside. “I think that’s my next move — I’d like to settle in the southwest and find a patch of land,” he says. “I don’t want a French garden, all manicured, I want a wilderness where me and the bees can play havoc. We all need a connection to the land, to worry less about ownership and more about being custodians. We should be humble, we are transient. Trees, I am sure, will outlive us.”
The Great Tree Story by Levison Wood (Octopus £25). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members. Wood’s tour, Walking the World: A Life of Exploration and Adventure, starts in May
