This is the story of a nature writer’s transformation into a dryad, a Green Man, a spirit of the oak.

Exhausted and overwhelmed by modern life, James Canton convinced the groundskeeper of an estate in Essex to allow him to visit the property’s grand matriarch – an 800-year-old oak tree – whenever he pleased. The estate used to be a deer park covered in ancient forest. Hundreds of oaks once stood together and weathered the wind and rain of centuries.

And then came the woodmen in the 1950s with their crude two-man chainsaws. The oaks, some 14 metres in circumference, were felled for the value of their sturdy timber. Only one was spared, probably because the former owner of the estate had an affinity with the tree – photos from the 1930s show a tiny bench tucked against the oak’s gnarled trunk. It became known as the Honywood oak.

Under the bramble of the surrounding fields remain six-inch high stumps of the Honywood’s former brethren, smooth and grey like headstones. Canton likens them to the fossilised footprints of mammoths.

Of any tree, oaks apparently host the most animal life. This book is set out as diary entries that span two years of Canton’s observations of the buzz of activity that haloes Honywood. By day the shaded air beneath the oak’s canopy is flecked with black midges, droning hornets and gall wasps, which lay their eggs in the skin of the oak. (When an oak is besieged by wasps, it can warn surrounding oaks to boost the tannins in their bark, which deters insects.)

There are chiffchaffs, treecreepers, green woodpeckers and jays, which commonly sow oak seedlings after consuming acorns. Beyond, sparrowhawks and kestrels cut the sky, and James is particularly enchanted by the calls of goldcrests, teeny yellow-mohawked birds that sound like ‘cymbal chimes’. By night there are little owls, snow-white angel moths and pipistrelle bats. Beetles burrow in the crumbling red heartwood. The most spirited of Canton’s meditations on the oak are those that involve the enigmatic beings associated with the trees throughout history. He recounts the rumoured rituals of Druids – ‘oak priests’ – and examines the Green Man, a figure with a face made of leaves ‘carved into the oak beams of the finest churches and cathedrals across Europe’, who appears as early as the first century CE in Roman art. The Green Man manifests in more modern times in tales of wild children with green-tinged skin. At one point, fantasy bleeds into the real; after a dawn visit to an oak in an empty field near his home, Canton is startled by a slight figure, barefoot and longhaired, pelting away from him in the first light of morning.

But Canton skirts hard questions: is his experience of the oak a true experience of nature, when the oak stands in a manicured private garden, cordoned by a man-made fence, with holes in its great stag plugged by cement? Is it possible to have a pure experience of nature at all in a world so irrevocably warped by the unnatural forces of industry? James barely flirts with these questions. I can’t decide if it’s blissful ignorance or necessary green escapism in a world fraught with the reminders of nature’s drastic decline.

Canton refrains from putting much of himself in this book. There is brief mention of a lost father and hints of the heartbreak that first led Canton to seek out the healing powers of the oak. Although I was curious to learn more about Canton, this restraint invites the reader to step into the narrative to fill the gaps, to feel the calm, peace and timelessness of the oak as he does. He becomes a kind of vessel for the reader to experience the wonder and wisdom of Honywood; he is a Green Man, guiding our hands to rest on the ancient body of the oak.

Reviewed by Angus Dalton