The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature

"Finalist"

"The premise of The Forest Unseen is that the author is a biologist who goes out with a one meter square quadrat, which is a scientific measuring grid. You put it down and see what’s within the square. He took it to a wood near to where he lived and went to look at what he could see in this one meter square regularly throughout the whole year. It sounds quite a boring premise, but it was beautiful. It’s a book about just looking and looking and being interested in everything. There’s the blossom coming in spring, there are insects — and that would then lead him off into a long explanation about the evolution of insects. It was a very educational nature book. It’s done in a way that made me think, ‘This is achievable. I could do this in one meter square of my garden if I just slow down and am interested in everything.’ Knowing the names of things is a superpower. I’m useless at it as well, but I use an app called Seek . I talk about it a lot in my book—it has been such a useful companion. It’s like having someone clever, like David Haskell, in my pocket to help me learn. Once you know the name of a tree, you start to see it more often and you start to care about it and connect with it more. It’s very important, I think, to learn names."