The Tree Climbing Cure: Finding Wellbeing in Trees in European and North American Literature and Art

Our relationship with trees is a lengthy, complex one. Since we first walked the earth we have, at various times, worshiped them, felled them and even talked to them. For many of us, though, our first memories of interacting with trees will be of climbing them. Exploring how tree climbers have been represented in literature and art in Europe and North America over the ages, The Tree Climbing Cure unpacks the curative value of tree climbing, examining when and why tree climbers climb, and what tree climbing can do for (and say about) the climber’s mental health and wellbeing. Bringing together research into poetry, novels, and paintings with the science of wellbeing and mental health and engaging with myth, folklore, psychology and storytelling, The Tree Climbing Cure also examines the close relationship between tree climbing and imagination, and questions some longstanding, problematic gendered injunctions about women climbing trees. Discussing, among others, the literary works of Margaret Atwood; Charlotte Bronte; Geoffrey Chaucer; Angela Carter; Kiran Desai; and J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as work by artists such as Peter Doig; Paula Rego; and Goya, this book stands out as an almost encyclopedic examination of cultural representations of this quirky and ultimately restorative pastime.

Andy Brown is Director of Creative Writing, University of Exeter, UK. A widely published poet and critic, his previous poetry books include Exurbia (2014), The Fool and the Physician (2012) and Goose Music (with John Burnside, 2008) and, as editor, The Writing Occurs As Song: a Kelvin Corcoran Reader (2014).

Richard Kerridge is a nature writer and ecocritic who leads the MA in Creative Writing and co-ordinates research and postgraduate studies in English Literature and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, UK. His works include: Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians (2014), J. H. Prynne's place-based poem-sequence The Oval Window, in collaboration with the late N. H. Reeve (2018), Writing the Enviornment (1998) and his other nature writing has been broadcast and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing. He was founding Chair of ASLE-UKI and has been an elected member of the ASLE Executive Council. With Greg Garrard he is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Academic series 'Environmental Cultures' – the first series of monographs in the Environmental Humanities to be published in Britain and he is a member of the steering committee of New Networks for Nature.

Greg Garrard is Associate Professor of Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of the bestselling book Ecocriticism (2nd edition, 2011) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014).