Book of trees ‘Boswerk’ speaks to you from the coffee table: put me down and go outside!

Trees have a problem: people hardly notice them, we have long forgotten how important they are to us. This message is hidden in Forest work by painter Christiaan Kuitwaard and poet Jan Kleefstra. They made a special amalgam with oil paintings of forests and trees combined with lyrical texts and short poems. Whoever leafs through the book, initially thinks that it is best to open it every now and then as a source of inspiration: put me back on the coffee table and go outside, to the woods!

Painter and poet visited dozens of locations together, where they joined forces as they had before Fieldwork had done, a similar book about the disappearance of biodiversity in the increasingly monocultural Friesland.

Kleefstra’s loving lyrics are repetitive: several times spiders land on coats, white-fronted geese pass over, woodpeckers drum. Apparently without a red line, until it sinks in: it is always the same bird species and always the same smaller critters that return. For the good listener: this is what disappearing biodiversity does.

Big topic

For a big topic like the loss of forests and climate change Forest work a modest booklet: 17.5 by 24.5 cm, in oblong format. The latter is somewhat surprising: why cast a book about trees in a horizontal form? In many of his beautiful tree portraits, Kuitwaard opts for either trunk or crown. He can only capture groups of trees or shrubby specimens from foot to crown in one image. On the other hand, of course, (FSC) paper is used for every copy of this book – and if we want to save trees, we better not print books that are too large.

The heart of the book is a series of sharp essays by Annelies Henstra, former project leader of nature conservation organization IUCN, who explains the importance of trees. She begins her speech with a personal history: as a child she learned to play the violin. She is therefore, wood under the chin, dependent on trees without realizing it.

Consciousness comes later. When, as an adult, she moves to a home in the Amerongse Bos, Henstra has to deal with the commercialization of trees: Staatsbosbeheer makes a turnaround in management around 2014, fueled by cutbacks. The result is clear-cutting, which would be good for new growth – of tree species that are suitable for felling again within a few years. Forestry instead of nature management.

Read also: Many forests no longer survive in the summer, then they no longer absorb CO2

Tree after tree can fall over

As a reader you are shocked by how many orange dots Henstra incorporates into her texts: trees with dots are nominated for felling. Not just for the wood, a little later a Douglas fir with a nest of ravens – a red list bird whose nest must be protected until after the breeding season – has to make way for a mountain bike route.

Between all these vicissitudes, Henstra describes what we do to trees with such a policy: after the felling of an adjacent forest plot, a beech finds itself in full sun, while its bark is not designed for this, the tree dies and falls over, its neighbor comes in the sun, and so within a few years an entire avenue can fall down beech after beech; in cities, ‘soil compaction’ and ‘reduction in habitat’ of a tree – in other words: restricting living space because it gets in the way of new buildings – often mean death. It is too easy to forget that, in Henstra’s words, trees are “just other, non-human life forms.”

A special chapter has been reserved for the Broekhuizerlaan in Leersum, one of the most beautiful beech avenues in the Netherlands. It was in danger of being cut down, because the management of the old trees became too expensive for the owners. After actions by local residents, environmental organization Urgenda took on the maintenance.

A crowdfunding campaign has been set up to preserve the avenue, six bays wide in some places and not exactly intact after the disastrous fall wind of 2021. Forest work was unveiled on April 22, with the first copy being presented to Urgenda director Marjan Minnesma, in persistently calm pouring rain. The presenter found the weather somewhat disappointing for the festive occasion – how human. While almost 700 ancient giants gratefully took up the water to prepare for summer.