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| A detail from the cover of Oliver Rackham’s History of the Countryside |
My hero:
Oliver Rachman by Richard Mabey
A tribute to the botanist and nature writer who died last week
Saturday 21 February 2015
I
first saw Oliver Rackham perform in 1973, at a cross-disciplinary conference on the British oak held that autumn in Sussex University. We were at the dark heart of what Oliver was later to call “the locust years” (he loved a good epigram) when the forestry sector was trashing native woodland, and the subtext of the conference was a subtly orchestrated counter-attack by British ecologists, a bid to rehabilitate the national tree. Oliver was their secret weapon. He appeared on the platform looking so much the eccentric young don (he had one elbow of his coat darned red, the other green) and the power of what he delivered was stunning. He dismembered myths, caught erstwhile authorities with their factual trousers down, gave a glimpse of a community history lived not apart from trees but with them. He had measured the timber in old Suffolk houses and found the woods they were built from. He knew, first-hand, how woods worked, and that oak had been part of a different culture of woodmanship, based on natural regeneration, not industrial planting.
