Robert Macfarlane: 'Come and meet this incredible tree'

New Statesman​

22-05-2025

Photo by Peter Flude
In middle age and closing in on national treasure status, Robert Macfarlane is as close to greatness and far from death as he has ever been. It's a far cry from his perilous youth of solitary mountain summitting. Climbers, he wrote in his first book, Mountains of the Mind, are 'half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion'.
That book's hero was George Mallory, the explorer who died on his third attempt at climbing Everest. Macfarlane read Mallory's letters home, and traced the slow drift of his heart from wife to mountain, life to glory. In his imagination, Mallory's frozen corpse seemed inhuman and immortal, like a Grecian marble sculpture. For a moment in what he now calls those 'selfish' days, Macfarlane expected that he too would die in the mountains: 'They were my first love, and they will be the last.'
They weren't. Mountains turned out to be his 'resignation letter from danger'. His wife is his 'rock' now, and they have three children. By his third book, The Old Ways, about ancient paths, published nine years later, he was relieved to see a peak and feel no desire to climb it, instead being 'glad only to have seen it in such weather and such light'. Now he is happier adventuring with friends than alone. On a recent trip to a 'fabulously precipitous mountain', he told me, 'I found myself very happy to take the path that worked around the danger, rather than over the pinnacles.' As with his role model Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain (1977), 'Circumambulation came to replace summit fever… plateau substituted for peak.'
His new book is 'the one I've been learning how to write all this time'. He knew he wanted to 'write about life', and in 2020 had three questions in a notebook: 'Can a forest think?', 'Does a mountain remember?', and his eventual title, 'Is a river alive?'.
By now Macfarlane has covered a lot of ground, and gathered many admirers. I came to his books through his friendship with the late swimmer and writer Roger Deakin. But others reach him through his conservation work, the music he makes with the actor Johnny Flynn, or his vastly popular children's book The Lost Words. We met at Cambridge's Emmanuel College, where he teaches English. I had been informed he was something of a heartthrob to students. 'It seems very unlikely, pushing 50 and balding,' he laughed, and led me into the college gardens.
'Come and meet this incredible, incredible tree… The branches come down, they root, they reroot, they draw, and they surge back up. You see all the power they draw from the earth… If you cut those branches, they would be trees. So it's now fully self-supporting but also absolutely part of the original singular organism. The other incredible thing it does, if you start to notice, is it melts into itself. It's called inosculation, or in-kissing. Can you see one of the branches is starting to basically snog the other and then there are places where that merging is complete, like there? It's one of the best trees, and it's a good friend.'
Macfarlane takes his students to this tree to conduct the first supervision of their first year. It is a 220-year-old Oriental plane: only two in the world are known to have branches that reach the ground then climb back up in this way. He offered me homemade lemon and ginger tea from his Thermos. Sitting together at the stump, the effect was like sharing an umbrella in beautiful rain.
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Macfarlane was born into a medical family in 1976, to a mother with an 'astonishing sense of wonder' and a father of 'huge integrity', who were both 'always jumping into cold water'. They lived at the end of a country lane in Nottinghamshire, and for holidays visited his grandparents in the Cairngorms. It was 'a life filled with animals and with space'. Macfarlane went to Cambridge, then Oxford, and has not stopped teaching or writing since his PhD. Now, his publications are major occasions: in this magazine, the poet John Burnside declared him 'our finest nature writer'; John Banville praised his 'poet's eye, and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy'. As well as mountains and paths, his books have covered wilderness (The Wild Places) and subterranean landscapes (Underland).
Is a River Alive? is billed as Macfarlane's most political book to date. In the years he was writing it, Britain's river crisis rose in the public consciousness. Headlines reported that every river in England was polluted beyond legal limits, Thames Water almost went bankrupt, and the summer drought of 2022 moved the source of the Thames nine miles downstream.
The disaster, Macfarlane said, 'is born of a failure of imagination… We have come to envision water in this country as a privatised deterritorialised resource, and not as the life force, lifeline, history-maker, life-giver that it is.' He would like for us to see rivers as living things, and to give them rights.
The book describes journeys to three rivers that have generated 'revolutionary thinking', and which run through a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador, contaminated lagoons in south-east India, and the wilderness of Quebec. Flowing through the narrative is the small, nameless chalk stream that has its spring by Macfarlane's house, just outside Cambridge.
The government's draft Planning and Infrastructure Bill was published in March. 'At the heart of it,' Macfarlane explained, 'is the idea of 'offset'. The idea that you might offset the harm you're going to do to a fragile and ultra-globally-limited chalk stream network in the name of growth – and to make it good through some kind of water work somewhere else – fundamentally fails to recognise the non-fungible nature of nature.'
He led me to what looked like a pond. In fact it was a surfacing of the book's chalk stream. He dropped to his knees and tapped the water. A large black fish swam up, sort of belched its mouth out beyond its lips, and bit Macfarlane's finger. I realised, with horror, that it was now my turn. 'Hold your nerve,' he said, as I extended a tremulous digit towards the fish, who thankfully was no longer interested.
I withdrew my arm the moment I was told I had passed 'the great carp test', but Macfarlane's hand lingered. On his wrist was the red cloth bracelet given to him by a healer named Rita, one of many eccentric characters who feature in the book. What Macfarlane never foresaw, he said, was how each trip would bring him to someone who had come very near to death, then found their way from grief, 'back towards life by water', by sharing a river's life with others.
Some of these people were present at the book's launch party in London the following week. The author arrived by canal boat, leaping from its roof into the party. The room was packed with readers, students, children, beer, pizza, sandals and bits of tree in people's hair. Later, Johnny Flynn led a singalong. In a speech, Macfarlane described the launch as a 'second-order wedding. I am astonished with delight at every face I see. Beloved family, dear friends. I thank you so much.' Conquering mountains in his adolescence, he drew exhilaration from the chance of death. But happiness is better found, he now feels, in the hope of joining life.
I recalled his description of the plane tree in Cambridge, equally a forest of trees and one individual tree: 'The whole thing is this great affront to singularity, and it's this incredible community.' Under that tree, he told me: 'It's been the work of many hands and many years to create this crisis, and it will be the work of many hands and many years to undo it.'
[See also: The brain behind Labour's EU deal]
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