Into the Forest

One of my Christmas presents last year was the book Gossip from the Forest by the Scottish writer Sara Maitland. The book, published in 2012, is billed as an inquiry into ‘the tangled roots of our forests and fairytales’. Like much of Maitland’s work, it’s a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, which interleaves personal accounts of her visits to twelve British forests with retellings of twelve traditional European fairytales. 

I might write a post on fairy tales and travel another time, but this post will be about forests and travel. Twelve times in the course of a year, Sara Maitland set out on a journey, the exclusive aim of which was to visit a forest. It struck me, reading about these visits, how rarely I’ve done that. A forest hasn’t often been the object of my quest when I’ve gone travelling. Excursions into forests and woodlands have tended to be bonuses or side-trips, optional extras or icing on the cake, rather than the main event. This is not from any lack of interest in trees on my part: my father was an arborophile and enthusiastic tree-planter, so I grew up knowing the names of many different tree species and how to recognise them. But as I’ve travelled over the years, the idea of visiting a forest somehow hasn’t come up as often as the idea of visiting other kinds of landscape. Now why is that?

One rather sad reason, I think, is that forests are hard to photograph, and if there’s one thing we like to do on our travels, it’s to record the experience with our cameras (or phones). We tend to look at mountains and coastlines from below, above or afar, from some vantage point that makes it easier to compose an image inside a rectangular frame. But forests enfold us, and the multiplicity of trees confuses the eye. Attempts to photograph forests from the inside often come out looking messy, without a clear focal point. 

Luckily, the Japanese concept of shinrin-yoku – ‘forest-bathing’ – provides a whole other way of thinking about why we might like to spend time in forests: not to capture an image like a trophy, but to surrender ourselves to a multisensory experience. Forests nourish our senses of touch, smell and hearing. They offer plenty of visual interest too, but with an emphasis on close-ups rather than panoramas.

Inspired by Sara Maitland’s book, I now have a list of British forests I want to visit. At the top is the evocatively named ‘Staverton Thicks’ (only in England!), an oak forest in Suffolk. Maitland describes this ‘smallish piece of ancient deciduous woodland’ as an imaginative portal to ‘the forests of childhood, the forests of dreams’, where all kinds of magic seem possible. Who could resist that? But I may have to wait a while to fulfil this fantasy, given the current restrictions on international travel.

Luckily I had the chance to visit some truly magnificent wooded landscapes here in Australia, just before the borders between our states closed. These were the forests in the Great Otway National Park in Victoria, which lie a short distance inland from the renowned Great Ocean Road. (Everything seems to be ‘great’ down in Victoria!) If you find yourself planning a visit to that part of Australia I strongly recommend that you allow time to drive (or even better, walk) through the forested parts of the Park as well as along the more famous coastline. In my opinion these parts are just as beautiful and awe-inspiring, and you’ll be sharing them with far fewer tourists. 

I saw two types of woodland in the Great Otway National Park. The first was a relatively dry kind of forest consisting of mountain ash and eucalypts, many of them incredibly tall.  The best way to get a sense of the height of these trees is to visit Otway Fly Treetop Adventures, where there’s a zipline (not, I think, a good way to experience the solemnity of the forest) and, at much lower cost, an elevated walkway that takes you high into the treetops, offering the chance to enter a secret world of arboreal skyscrapers.

The second kind of woodland is temperate rainforest, ancient and lush. This is a landscape you descend into to discover quiet streams, splendid waterfalls and fern gullies that seem to have survived from a prehistoric world. Water trickles over stones and fallen trees melt back into the undergrowth, draped in vivid green moss. The colour of that moss, when it absorbs sunshine that has pierced the tree canopy high above, reminded me of Robert Frost’s enigmatic line ‘Nature’s first green is gold’, from the poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’.  That green-gold may be, as Frost says, nature’s ‘hardest hue to hold’, and it’s certainly hard for a camera lens to hold. But it’s easy for memory to hang on to and treasure.

These forest-bathing experiences in southwestern Victoria have made me hungry for more forests to visit. What’s the most beautiful forest you know of? It might be a local woodland where you’ve walked many times, or a forest you travelled far to see: either way, I’d love to have your suggestions so I can add them to my list of dream forests to visit one day. 

Did you know?

It’s OK to use the words ‘forest’ and ‘woodland’ interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference between the two. The Oxford English Dictionary defines woodland as ‘land covered with trees’ and forest as ‘an extensive tract of land covered with trees and undergrowth’. Do you see the difference? It’s in that word ‘extensive’. So, the UK’s Woodland Trust explains, areas designated as forests tend to be larger than those designated as woods. The Australian Government’s Department of the Environment uses not only the size of the area covered but also the density of trees to decide whether a place is a forest or a woodland. Simply, woodlands have ‘fewer and more scattered trees than forests’. If you want to be really precise, woodlands ‘contain widely spaced trees, the crowns of which do not touch’. So now you know!