The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature

This is the best book about a guy staring at the same spot on the ground for a year that you could possibly imagine.

That's honestly not an inaccurate description. The author picked out a small patch of ground in an old-growth forest in Tennessee -- he refers to it as "the mandala" by analogy with Buddhist sandpaintings meant to represent the cosmos in miniature -- and returned to it regularly over the course of a year, examining it closely and musing on what he found there. And those musings are fantastic, a thoughtful, poetic blending of science, philosophy, and human emotion that illuminates the natural world and reflects on our place in it in a way that feels to me utterly and profoundly right. It's also full of lots and lots and show more lots of insights and facts about various plants, animals, and fungi that leave me repeatedly exclaiming "How did I never know this before?!"

Rating: 5/5. I think that's actually the first book this year that I've given the full 5 out of 5 to, so that should tell you something about just how highly I think of it. show less

This is the story of a biologist from the University of the South in Tennessee who spends some time each week in a mandala, a 12'x12' piece of old-growth forest, near to his university, mostly just observing. Each short chapter deals with a different aspect of the living community in the mandala, whether it be plant or animal life. This story would not work if the author didn't have such a rich background in the sciences or such a gift with words. Somehow he was able to transport me to this small world and make it utterly fascinating, week after week. I learned how plants and trees prepare themselves for the winter, why vultures are the purifiers of the forest, what forms of life live underground, why forests are saving us from the show more full-out effects of climate change, and the evolutionary kinship we humans have with the forest. A peaceful read, and an enlightening book. show less

Letter I wrote to the author:
I’ve just finished reading The Forest Unseen. I have slowly savored your book over many weeks, reading one day’s entry, at most two, at one sitting. I have never read anyone who combined a meditative consciousness with a scientist’s mind so beautifully. You presented the theme of the interconnectedness of all things so delightfully in so many amazing forms: bird’s eggs, vultures, lichen, and the roothair-fungus relationship all come easily to mind as examples.
Long ago I learned to walk in the woods without a goal. I live in western North Carolina and for many years lived on a gravel road surrounded by national forests. I carved my own hiking trails to special places—a rock outcropping, a particular show more tree, a springhead flowing over a small rock cliff—and would walk to those places and then sit and observe.
Now I live in Asheville, in a mountain cove with a lawn that is mostly Prunella vulgaris. Four or five afternoons a week (I work at home) I spend time in a little patch of this lawn with my cat, sitting and observing the ants, spiders, and other creatures crawling over the vegetation. You’ve inspired me to see this suburban patch as my own mandala and look even close than before.
You’ve created a book that I know I will enjoy reading many times in my life. I already plan on having my husband read this aloud to me, so we can savor it together. show less

Haskell presents a beautiful, complex and inspiring book about the human condition, masked in an exploration of nature. For one year, he revisits the same one square metre of forest countless times, documenting what he finds from nematodes to deer to golf balls to ephemeral flowers to fungi. The story is broad reaching, personal, and beautiful. Each chapter is another adventure into the history, ecology and specificity of another of the visitors to this small patch of land, helping to visualise the global in the tiniest of locals.

As Rachel Carson would hope for all nature writing, Haskell inspires a sense of wonder about the forest and the natural world, and simultaneously about the breadth of human ingenuity and discovery.

A lot of my woodland photography takes place in the small sphere, often showing slices of nature that go unnoticed by most people. That’s why the title of this book appealed to me. On reading, it isn’t so much the unseen, but the unknown. I learned a lot from this book which is written with a delicacy and awe of how much we don’t know. Here’s what it taught me -

>In winter evergreen plants protect against the damage too much cellular energy can cause by making vitamin C (p 24)
>Shrews can’t breathe long above ground (p 57)
>Male moths give salt to females as a mating gift (p 79)
>Bears sweat like horses do (p 80)
>Why is the sky blue? Photons! (p 85)
>Why the ash trees in my yard leaf later than the maples - ring porous xylem - like show more hickories have and that’s what makes the wood so hard and dense
>Only breeding female birds have a medullary bone, but not all the time (p 114)
>Like many a lady spider, lady fireflies often nosh on hubby (p 138)
>Fuzzy caterpillars have those guard hairs to ward off ants. Ants are a caterpillar’s biggest threat. Who knew? (p 170)
>Vulture intestinal tracts routinely kill cholera and anthrax (p 177)
>Those helicoptery maple seeds are actually called samaras (p 191)
>Hepatica’s purple leaves are a shield against wintertime sun damage. I always wondered why some leaves turned reddish and some didn’t - the ones in leaf litter don’t need to. (p 207)
>Birds maintain a low body weight for flight in part by causing their reproductive organs to atrophy out of breeding season. (p 209)

And that’s just the beginning. If you love nature, woodlands or are curious to see a little deeper into how an ecosystem works, this is a great book. show less

One of my favourite books of the year. Our narrator, an incredibly knowledgeable biologist with a real talent for explaining, spent a year visiting a single square meter of forest and observing the animal and plant life that he saw there. Beautifully written and often very poetic, highly recommended.

I followed up The Overstory with The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell. Haskell, a biologist, adopts a meter-wide area of western Tennessee forest to examine over the course of a year. His observations of this world, from the tops of the trees to the leaf mulch and below, lead to detailed and engaging explorations of the natural world. Haskell covered some of the topics the Powers did and lamented man's impact on nature although his book is a bit more joyful. I have added his others books--Sounds Wild and Broken and The Songs of Trees to my TBR list.