Book Review

By Eugenia ParryBook review of The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, by David George Haskell (Penguin, 2012)A man is lying prone in the Tennessee woods, staring at a patch of ground with a magnifying glass. He’s a biologist. He wants to see exactly what happens when a mosquito bites him. The fine, flexible needle, jutting from the head of this “hungry lady,” pierces his skin. Deftly probing to find a capillary, she injects chemicals that keep the blood from clotting. Then he watches her invading body swell with his blood.Such minute and intrepid seeing is the subject of The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. Its author is a rare combination of scientist and poet. He discovers a creative process: observe, feel, ponder, write.In a rash move, stripped naked at minus 20 degrees, he wanted to learn why his body wouldn’t stay as warm as a chickadee’s when it successfully winters over and survives. He discovered nothing except the sting of incipient frostbite and admiration for chickadees.His program was simple. Visiting the woods he absorbed only what took place within a circular patch of ground, a meter in diameter. His model was the patient concentration he witnessed in two Tibetan monks as they streamed colored sand through funnels laboriously to create a circular mandala depicting a lotus flower. Their mandala was not made to last. After completion, the monks swept its sands into the wind. The biologist thought about how mandalas recreate the path of life, the cosmos, the enlightenment of the Buddha. His mandala would also be “the whole universe … seen thorough this contemplative window, a small circle of sand.” He would respond only to what occurred there in a single year. As the seasons changed, the truth of the entire forest would be revealed.With every visit to his mandala, blooming hepatica, emerging fungi or moss, the sound of earthworms, the glances of animals touched resources within himself. He began writing—54 essays—about microbes and root hairs, medicinal mayapples, the necessity of vultures, the geometry of snowflakes, the resourceful genius of coyotes compared to the mere rages of wolves. Hearing a tiny shriek under the leaves, he found a shrew and contemplated the hysterical anxieties and “furious metabolism” that shorten shrews’ lives. He pondered the incredible, latent “power stored in quiescent plants” in winter. He realized how trees affect our minds and that the Japanese have turned this recognition into a practice. Through shinrin-yoku, or bathing in forest air, we meet the wet chemical core of ourselves.Why should the meditations of this forest gazer be required reading for gardeners? Because they’re a beautiful primer that awakens us to the meaning of our work. Each of our gardens is a point of intense focus. We compost, dig, plant, mulch—we’re always at it. Why not stop? Flop down on our bellies. Smell earthworms’ sweet soil-building excrement. Love their industry. Reflect on the images that pass through our minds as we respond to “the overwhelming otherness of the physical earth.” We come to gardening not only to work and promote growing things. Our gardens are our mandalas. They fasten us to our place in the universe.