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” A culture is no better than its woods.”
W.H.Auden
On a late August day, a boreal forest shared with me its wisdom. A Scandinavian taiga of dark coniferous complexion, wafting a pinene scent into a silvery sky, already cool with impending autumn. I had fallen behind my companions and lain down on a soft bed of lichen and moss. Looking up at the sharp tree outline against the sky, I suddenly realized how easy it would be to die in a forest. A simple, even pleasant formality, a mere floating onward like a bit of pollen. No religious discourse, in my view, could be more illuminating than this.
We do not go to the forest only to hunt, pick berries, walk a pet, but mainly to make peace with our brief destiny, sandwiched between birth and death. The writer Robert Harrison noted in his book translated to Forêts in French: ”Nature knows how to die, but human beings mostly know how to kill, in their incapacity to fulfill their ecology.”?[1]?
Over centuries, Europe’s forests have served as fortuitous graves to soldiers, and outcasts of all types. In today’s Europe, this inadvertent role of the past may have prepared for the growing appeal of cinerary woods, (forest cemeteries). For centuries, too, it has inspired art, literature, poetry, medicine, mysticism, and was a frequent backdrop to folklore and fairytales. Surprisingly or not in our technological time, it continues to be regarded as a place of esoteric forces and elemental egalitarianism.
In the last twenty years, a few European countries have legalized incineration burials in some of their forests, in a felicitous collaboration between environmental conservation and the deceased. All at once ecological, commemorative, aesthetic, idealistically classless, as Harrison points out:”The forest gives to each their due and privileges no one to another’s detriment.”[2]. It must be said that it is also a cheaper alternative to a traditional burial. Cinerary forests have gained favor in Sweden, Finland, Great Britain, France and Germany. During a walk in Fontainebleau forest with disciples of “slow time” I was surprised by the appeal forest burials have for younger generations. A twenty-something girl told me that she wanted this type of burial. It was ecological and reassuring, she said, as if talking about the cottage of her dreams.
But the resurgent fascination for forests goes, literally, beyond the valedictory aspect. Existing well beyond our own span of time, forests evoke both immortality and our distant past as Homo sapiens hunters, (humans began hunting in Europe 350 000 to 400 000 years ago). Nor am I alone in seeking an alternative to our compulsive virtual habits. These, in my opinion, undermine a direct experience with nature, and with life itself. Moreover, today’s enthusiasm for forests demonstrates a rejection of humanity’s ubiquity and a growing attention to other species.
Europe’s last primary forests or patches, thereof, embody the chiaroscuro of marvel and terror that inspired Europe’s fairytales, but also an environment where man does not dominate. If not validated as “primary”, an ancient forest identifies as “old growth”, or one left long to its own regenerative devices, though at some previous point significantly altered by man. However, even a primary forest like Bialowieza, extending between Poland and Belorussia, has been modified by man’s actions, and continues to be so despite legal protection. Nonetheless, a visit to Bialowieza remains a unique experience. One walks among multi-centenary trees surrounded by luminescent mosses, giant mushrooms, wildflower carpets, limpid pools in which European bison drink. The arboreal maze displays an antediluvian splendor rarely seen in Europe nowadays. Unlike an American Northwest counterpart, whose overpowering beauty distances itself from the human psyche, Europe’s primary forest seems to have an anthropic sensitivity and to preserve a collective memory in dendriform archives.
Giant mushrooms in Bialowieza. Photo credit: Stephanie Sears.
Even the more common and accessible “secondary” forests can offer to an increasing number of trekkers, that pervasive wisdom of a Master Yoda, and that laboratory of heuristic self-discovery. Science has even found that secondary forests defend the planet more efficiently than more ancient ones against the previsions of a global temperature increase, (0.5 to 1.5C by 2050).
Europeans feel viscerally close to forests that have witnessed and inspired so much of their history and culture. They perceive within them a sagacity and lyricism that has inspired much of their poetry and literature; and seems to offer a portal to another dimension, like the mirror evoked by the writer Jorge Borges.
I. Another dimension
The formula “return to the forest’” crops up noticeably these days, as solution to a broad range of concerns, be they cosmetic, cultural, or socio-psychological. As if Europe were endorsing those words of W.H. Auden:” A culture is no better than its woods.”
Paris hosted in March 2025 several highly popular conferences on European forests, focused on ecology, yet with a cultural undertone. The overall message was that we cannot live without ‘real’ forests, by contrast with industrially purposed monocultures. The public was advised to expand its relationship to forests beyond the recreational, to “a way of life”. Environmental professionals were warned against imposing punitive and discouraging rules of environmentalism on that same public. The forest, implicitly presented as a living entity, was sunscreen to the planet’s crust, maker of rain, purifier of air and water. In short, an essential ally to our survival.
The twentieth-century anthropologist Gregory Bateson, had observed among indigenous people a close alliance such as the one recently propounded for Europeans. Tribal people acknowledged forest entities with which they collaborated respectfully. By the same token, demonstrating advanced environmental knowledge which, Bateson argued, obliterated western assumptions of their superstition. The anthropologist Philippe Descola[3] finds a similar collaboration between forest and Amazonian people. In fact, the same association with nature existed among Europe’s pagan Slavic, Celtic, Baltic, Sami-Finnish, Norse and Graeco-Roman people; surviving somewhat alongside later Judeo-Christian traditions.
In the sixteenth-century Europe developed an approach to nature that synthesized Judeo-Christian thought with a combination of Kabbalah and Neo-Platonism, replacing materialist logic with the notion of a pervasive divinity giving impetus to all things. The philosopher/physician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, developed similar ideas through Hermetism and Arab astrological magic. The Venetian Franciscan, Francesco Giorgi, in his De Harmonia Mundi, used a numerical value system through which God’s name was found to mean “tree of life”.
Kabbalistic esoterism believed in a correspondence between nature and a cosmos ruled by spirits and angels. A concept that has recently been partially upheld by the discovery that trees react to their immediate surroundings and pulse to phases of the sun and moon according to the earth’s tilt and orbit around the sun.[4] Sixteenth-century occultist John Dee described this connection between nature and the cosmos as “one temple”. For the physician Robert Fludd, too, the earth was microcosm to the universe’s macrocosm. For the astrologer Nostradamus, the sun transmitted its divinity to nature.
The current tendency to amplify nature beyond mere ecology seems to echo sixteenth century esoterism, and the Louvres’ recent exhibition on the Habsburg Emperor Rodolphe II came as no surprise. In his keen interest for nature, Rodolphe II created a ‘garden of trees’ around his Prague palace and, with an equal fascination for esoterism, surrounded himself with the likes of the philosopher heretic Giordano Bruno, the theologian Johann Pistorius, his court mathematician Johann Kepler. The latter associated magic to a science, unable, alone, to elucidate nature’s mystery.
European literature is routinely inspired by the forest. It has used it as refuge for star-crossed lovers, as the abode of both madness and lucidity, as in Balzac’s short story Adieu. In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent it is a lawless dark force. In medieval literature, the quintessential space for quests and exploits. In German literature, it is a place of ultimate freedom and loneliness, the “Waldeinsamkeit” of a German’s communion with his forest.
Poetry and visual art thrive on that sylvan environment, called “the eighth continent” by the bio-engineer Pieter Defrennes, (specifically referring to the forest canopy). Both art forms celebrate the beauty of ancient trees and forests. For cruelly disadvantaged humans on that count, tree species like bristlecone, cypress, olive – attaining thousands of years of age -, seem to possess quasi supernatural powers.
Well before science, poetry intuited that, like the human psyche, trees were reactive, communicative, competitive as well as collaborative; it evoked a forest , idyllic before man’s interference, in Harriet Annie Wilkins The Forest River; or a companionable backdrop to man’s romantic and political disputes, as in Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.
The visual arts of Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder, or Eugene Viala, show the anthropomorphic individuality of trees and our symbiosis with them. Aegidius Sadeler’s trees resemble our nervous systems or brains. The contemporary artist Martin Soto Climent makes that analogy even more evident. Pierre-Luc Poujol turns tree segments into magical dimensions. Agustin Ibarrola, painting directly onto trees in the forest of Oma in Biscay, seems to reaffirm their ancient totemic role.
But it is perhaps the historical dimension of European forests that brings them closest to Europeans. The 2003 Vienna Declaration, in its Living Forest Summit officialized the cultural and historical value of certain European forests. Some of these, pocked by artillery, fertilized by the spattered blood of soldiers, like the Argonne forest of World War I, had experienced extreme fighting. Other forests have much older memories, like Teutoburger forest that still honors the 9 AD Germanic victory over the Roman army. Forests have indeed been used by the military to confuse the enemy. From the sixteenth- to the nineteenth- century, the Habsburg Empire relied on its southeastern forests to stop the Turkish invasion. Even after forest has regrown over such historical sites, memory endures. During WWII, people summarily executed and buried in communal pits in the Slovenian forest of Kocevsko are still visited there.
But the forest can also transcend the horrors of battle by opening ‘a space in between’ and altering time into a phantasmagory described by David Jones’ In Parenthesis, and by Julian Gracq in Un balcon en Forêt.
As humanity seeks less the warmth of human contact than it once did, it comes to favor and find isolation from its peers through distant traveling, extreme hiking, or simply, ear buds….. Paradoxically, technology provides both anti-social modalities and constant contact with others, at the risk of further cheapening human relations. Surrounded, as they are, by human agitation and noise, city-dwellers are more likely to look for solace in the forest, if only for brief antidotal periods, against their virtual addictions and the ostensible ‘rat race’.
One may wonder how much further humanity’s anti-social trends will draw it back to the forest as a panacea. In his book Parmi les Arbres[5], Alexis Jenni poses the question:” What is this other way of being alive? It is to be immortal, to have no limits, to not know exactly what an individual is.”
The Tree as Hero, the Forest as Entity
The UN has pronounced the 21st of March as ‘Forest Day’. But after centuries of intense forest management, the humbling discovery is that nature does not need us, we need it. Beyond fresh air, clean water, building materials, it is, more essentially, the slow tempo of tree life, its cyclical resurrection over centuries, millennia, and an organic complexity previously misunderstood, that compel us to realize how far we have erred from nature. The intricate collaborations found between forest organisms, indications of some form of forest consciousness, fill us with remorse and fascination.
We are now living in that inter-glacial Holocene period begun 11,700 years ago, and part of the Quaternary Ice Age ‘s begun 2.6 million years ago. Vast climatic changes within that period have made forests expand and recede. Already during the previous Miocene (23 million to 5.333 million years ago), hornbeam, birch, willow, pine, spruce, juniper, cedar, oak, elm, grew alongside our ape-like antecedents. Though we typically imagine Europe then densely covered by untouched forests, research conducted by the Danish Aarhus University discovered that forests were in fact more open. Looking back115 000 to 120 000 years, to the Eem interglacial period, its research found a warm, moist climate favoring large herbivores, (rhinoceros, elephant, bison and horse) that reduced the forest cover by 50% to 75%. Some five to six thousand years ago, Homo sapiens initiated his own clearing through shifting agriculture and livestock fodder. If Europe’s central and northern regions remained mostly untouched by1000 BC, western and southern European forests had already shrunk in size.
Europe’s primary forests are rare today, and excluding Russia, represent 1.4 million hectares, or 0.7% of the total European forest cover; that surface, partly composed of discontinuous patches of up to 300 hectares. Often hard to locate, (most primary forests are in remote or mountainous areas), they can also be hard to distinguish between ‘virgin’ and ‘old-growth’. Western Europe is therefore cautious to identify primary forest at the lower end of its ‘primary’ spectrum. Apart from the celebrated forest of Bialowieza, of which only 20% is considered truly primary on the Polish side, 30% on the Belorussian side, the University of Berlin has recently attempted to map lesser known primary forests across Europe. In its assessment, the map makes allowance for persistent logging, mainly in Eastern Europe. The oldest forests are found in Scandinavia,; in the Slovakian Carpathians, the Zofin forest in the Czech Republic, Romania’s Isvoarele Nerei forest, Ukraine’s Uholka-Shyrokyi Luh forest, Austria’s Rothwald forest, Slovenia’s Kocevje forest; Germany’s five old growth beech forests.[6] Smaller clusters are found in Bulgaria, the Balkans, Spain, Portugal, France and Switzerland. Of these, 4.3% reach over one thousand hectares, a size allowing for preservation and biodiversity. Countries like Latvia, Moldova – by contrast with France and Italy’s detailed forest records – have little to no data, therefore preventing an accurate evaluation of Europe’s full range of primary forest.
So essential are primary forests to biodiversity, that botanist/ biologist Francis Hallé, hopes to reconstitute a 70 000 hectare primary forest at the heart of Western Europe. Existing forests along the French-German border, such as the four hundred hectare Lutzelhardt-Adelsberg Integral Reserve, will serve as base to an endeavor that will take seven hundred years to achieve.
While individual trees of great size remind us of the commanding forests that once covered Europe, these majestic organisms are composed, surprisingly, of insubstantiality: 50% carbon, 44% oxygen, 6% hydrogen, less than 1% of phosphorus, azote, calcium, with traces of other minerals.[7] Propelled upward by the hormone auxin, they punctuate landscapes with a cultural permanence, acquiring an ancestral status in the collective psyche. And at the same time that humanity recoils into virtuality, these trees remind us to re-connect with real life.
Celebrated today for their aesthetic and environmental significance, trees were once regarded in the spirit of pagan belief or religion. The cedar protected women in childbirth; the elm was the tree of elves; the maple brought prosperity; the pine exuded positive energy; the hazel helped to locate water; the hawthorn was portal to the supernatural; the immortal yew was favoured by Druids and magicians. Some of these virtues later proved scientifically accurate: the yew contains anti-cancerous taxols and the pine’s pinenes are also used medically. The hazel contains orientin, possibly another anti-cancerous compound, and other medicinal benefits.
European nations are taking stock of their ‘remarkable’ trees and recording their precise locations, species and ages. Like beauty pageants, regional frontrunners go on to become national assets in trans-European contests. The term ‘remarkable’ applies to one associated to a legend or anecdote. Like the 135 year-old Yorkshire Nellie’s Tree or Love Tree. Or the hundred year-old almond tree in Pecs, Hungary, that became famous as cultural symbol by association with the fifteenth century poet Janus Pannonius. Or the 150 year-old oak at Monte Barbeiro, Portugal, admired for its broad shade on top of an otherwise bare hill. And the 235 year-old Slovakian “Keeper of Great Moravian Secrets”, renowned for its proximity to a revered church.
One cherished individual, the 150 year-old Northumberland “Robin Hood” sycamore, was cut down in 2023 by two individuals, now prosecuted as criminals. Was it cut down for the thrill of desecrating something sacred? Will other ‘remarkable’ trees, likewise, succumb?
Other trees are defined as ‘monumental’ by virtue of age and beauty, some still surrounded by their native forest. I was introduced to the five hundred year-old “Queen of Rog” during a hike to the primary heart of Slovenia’s Rajhenav forest. In the surrounding hush of our introduction, I was tempted to curtsey to the fifty-five meter silver fir. Other such trees include a Swedish spruce, ‘Old Tjikko’ that, with its 9000 years of age or more, compels one to ponder the notion of immortality. The oldest tree in France is said to be a 1800 to 2200 year-old olive tree on Cap Martin. Scotland has the 2000 to 5000 year-old yew of Fortingall. Italy has the1230 year-old pine “Italus”. Crete has a 3000 year-old olive tree.
An eco-political rivalry seems to have emerged among European countries, as to who owns the oldest tree. Such specimens can indeed give rise to national pride and one might even speculate that it participates in a certain rejection of globalism and its perceived undermining of nationhood.
Forests are becoming an ultimate escape from the practical but dull standardization of modern life. In this sylvan world evocative of childhood tales, one may still glimpse some kind of magic:” the shadow of the forest.., that wild condition from which civilization uncertainly derives.”[8] A forest conveys a personality of its own. And though most weekenders will visit the more common “secondary” forest, the good news is that some of these, left to self-regenerate, are regaining an ”old-growth” persona.
In France’s Champagne region, Verzy Forest is famed for the genetic oddity of a stand of twisted and dwarfed beech trees. These possess an enigmatic though benign presence, different from, say, trees in the French/ Swiss forest of Risoux, once a contraband haven and a passage to Switzerland for Jews escaping the Nazis. The Swiss Sihlwald forest, despite its proximity to Zurich, seems a far away, secluded palace for elk, bear, lynx, wolf, wild boar. A Bulgarian Carpathian forest has an aspect that in no way resembles that of France’s forest of Broceliande, for example. The former has a stern, martial mien, while the latter, of Arthurian tradition, seems romantically disheveled, given to water mutterings, spasms of silence, snippets of magic.
Forest of Risoux. Photo credit: Stephanie Sears.
Other forests like Germany’s Odenwald, Latvia’s Pokaini , England’s Forest of Dean, flaunt a darker character inhabited by ghosts, devils, perambulating or bleeding stones.
III. Close up on the forest
The historical link between colonialism and tree felling (mainly for ship building) still affects today the size and quality of European forests. Countries with fewer colonies, are now reaping the benefit of owning more “old growth” forest.
To rank officially as a forest, a wooded area must cover at least 0.5 hectares, with trees at least five meters tall. 39% of Europe is covered by forest, composed of 46% coniferous (pine, spruce, fir), of 37% broadleaf (beech, oak, ash), of 17% mixed. Ten per cent of these forests are strictly protected. Three billion more trees are scheduled to be planted in degraded areas. In this way, Europe hopes to reduce gas emissions by 55% by 2050[9]. By 2030, it wants to reach at least 32% renewable energy, (ultimately aiming for 45%). Finland and Sweden have the most forest surface in Europe, covering respectively, 66.2% and 62.5% of their territory. Slovenia, with almost 58%, Austria, with 46.4%, rank highest in Central-Western Europe; followed by Bulgaria,(35.1%), France, (34.7%), Croatia, (34.3%). The UK, (13.5%) and Ireland,(11.4%) rank lowest. Since 2000, Europe’s total forest has increased by 5.5%,(8.3 million hectares). Ireland, France, Cyprus and Italy have led this increase.
While in the Amazon, two Russian field scientists, A.M. Makarieva and V. G. Gorshkov,[10] discovered that, contrary to previous understanding, trees cause rain by evaporation (four to five times more evaporation occurs over a forest), not the atmosphere itself; leafy or deciduous forests producing greater moisture than coniferous ones.
An auspicious concurrence exists between ecology and the public’s aesthetic preference for mixed forest which is gradually replacing monoculture forest. The latter, introduced in the eighteenth century, and continued until today, is now considered environmentally hazardous. Germany’s Harz spruce forest, decimated by the bark beetle, exemplifies the dire consequences of monoculture, causing a 10% loss of Germany’s forest. Mixed forests, to the contrary, effectively enrich the soil and perform better as ‘carbon sinks’. Europe’s 39% forest cover has yet to reach the ‘carbon sink’ goal of 13.22 billion tons, (equivalent to 378 million tons per year). Success will depend on a combination of agricultural reforms, expanding forests and improving their quality.
While for a time, Europe distanced itself from pre-Christian paganism, placing nature firmly under human aegis, it is once again showing a certain reverence for the forest, Recent scientific revelations about tree life may partly be the cause of this change:
“Sound produced by humans (i.e. highway or industrial noise) may prevent plants from perceiving important environmental information.”[12]
Such findings lead to taking into consideration a forest’s well-being. To reduce stress on soil and vegetation, some loggers prefer to return to horse and manpower instead of using heavy modern machinery. In the documentary/ interview To whisper in the ear of trees, forestry engineer13] Ernst Zürcher corroborates such changes with the story of a Florida orange grower who, by playing bird and insect recordings among his unproductive trees, restored them to vigour.
Druid performing a ritual in Brittany forest. Photo credit: Stephanie Sears.
This scientifically ‘sensitive’ approach to forest has found support among contemporary European Druids. In the 1960s and 70s, ancient pagan beliefs regained popularity, influenced by America’s movement ‘Nature- as- way- of- life’, as put forth in Bron Taylor’s book Deep Green Religion. But while the American movement leaned towards environmentalism, Europe’s enduring paganism, labelled “neo-paganism” stuck to its spiritual traditions. Celtic Druidism had revered Cernunnos, the horned god of forests, while Baltic-Finnic paganism had looked to Tapio, a similar divinity, and the Norse to the tree Yggdrasil…Today’s Druidic groups continue those traditions and are officially listed under the umbrella organization OBOD (order of Bards, Ovates and Druids). In one such group in Burgundy, Philippe Greffet regularly hosts a jovial and epicurean bunch of Druids, and believes that we would do best to live among trees so as to connect with vital sky and earth energies. A notion that struck me as remarkably in tune with science’s more recent revelations about tree life. Trees thrive thanks to miles of mycorrhizal filament networks underground, supplying and transferring water and sugars. Above ground, they connect, by photosynthesis, with the sun and react to tides and celestial movement. My walk in a Brittany forest, with the Druid Taliesin, closely resembled Shinrin-Yoku, or ‘forest bathing’, a therapy born in Japan against ‘technostress’, (i.e. too much screen time). Adopted in Europe during the Covid crisis, Shinrin-Yoku has gained ground as a natural remedy for high blood pressure, stress, cancer, frayed nerves, sleeplessness.[14] Thus, is the forest gradually becoming a place of medical and spiritual therapy. Mindful of this, my friend Laura gently guides her Shinrin-Yoku groups in Fontainebleau forest, well beyond fresh air walks or environmental lecturing, into a playfully esoteric relationship with the forest. Enchantment seems to dwell all around us. Her approach rests on the science of ecologists like Suzanne Simard who, in her writings, has put forth notions of ‘mother’ trees and family groupings, using terms which intentionally foster a greater relatability to forests. Likewise, the silviculturist, Peter Wohlleben, in his book The Hidden Life of Trees,[15] promotes the idea of a forest being, capable of feeling and some form of thought process. Such a notion had previously been expressed by D.H Lawrence in his short story Saint Mawr: “They smell to me more alive than people. These trees hold their bodies hard and still, but they listen with their leaves.”
The biologist Rupert Sheldrake ventures further into that wondrous possibility of a conscious forest by proposing the theory of “morphic resonance”. His theory suggests that trees reproduce patterns, relying on a collective memory that can learn and adapt. His hypothesis is that, since reliance on genetic coding represents only 5 to 10 % of the process, a tree’s capacity to reproduce a form, (leaf, bark…etc), is far from just mechanistic.
It is perhaps with greater urgency than elsewhere that the ‘old continent’ seeks a new societal reference/reverence. Elements of its Judeo-Christian background are allying with ancient beliefs in response to a growing environmental awareness: a trend that aspires to a better social cohesion as societies grow more heterogenous. Forests become focal points of national pride, as in the German “Kulturlandshaft”(cultural landscape), yet spared the socio-cultural exclusion once found in the Third Reich’s “lebensraum” (living space);instead, offering an inherently harmonizing force through the existence of what the folklorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl called the “eternal forest”.
Forests are not yet entirely integrated to a city dweller’s daily life, as the Druid Philippe Greffet would have it, and one must travel to reach them. By observing a city-state like Singapore, however, and its audacious vegetalisation incorporating wildlife, (with a resident otter population), one may envision how far Europe’s historical cities might go.
Artificial trees being vegetalized in Singapore. Photo credit: Stephanie Sears.
The “rule of 3-30-300” requires that each city individual be able to see at least three trees from where he lives, with access to 30% tree canopy within 300 meters of his residence. This has been traditionally achieved by planting trees along streets, in squares and in other such standard, often symmetrical ways. But these efforts submit to the city format rather than reshape it.
The main goal behind foresting large cities has been to reduce the ‘island heat’ effect. In the 1970s,the botanist Akira Miyawaki suggested growing miniature forests, (as small as three square meters), at the heart of urban centers with the added goal of alleviating visual stress. Such mini forests, densely planted in optimal soil, with a great diversity of regional vegetation, were left to develop by themselves. Their trees grew faster (up to ten times faster) than in larger, natural woods. Europe has since embraced this concept with companies born in the last decade, like Boomforest in France, Citizen Forest in Germany, fostering both enjoyment and a new kind of neighbourhood involvement.
The urban foresting momentum is underway. The mayor of Paris has recently planted a woodland with thick undergrowth in front of the Hotel de Ville and planned another around the Palais Garnier. One already covers Paris’ circular Place de Catalogne. Milan has created in its centre a 16.8-hectare green space called Citylife, comprising some woods. Prague was nominated in 2025 for best urban forest. Oslo enjoys a 72.03% forest cover. Berlin and Rome top the list of best wooded cities in Europe.
But one may ask: will urban forests transform our European cities beyond recognition? Some of us, after all, cherish the traditional urban format. Will cities such as Paris, Dublin or Barcelona end up looking more like Tolkien’s Lothlorian? Will we live like forest elves, in the constant shade of trees, amidst smells of moss and mushroom? Will we glimpse our city’s familiar perspectives and monuments through the branches of woodland architectures?
It seems safe to say that, for the near future, countryside forests will continue to supply the main escape from the ever-tightening squeeze of urban agglomerations and modern life. Those forests will continue to provide nature’s peaceful sounds and blissful solitude, perhaps even, for some, supranatural perceptions. It would be unfortunate, therefore, if such spaces were marred or taken from us under the guise of environmental monitoring and safety concerns. François Caron, head of the company Goodforest, for the sustainable management of forests, reassures me. The satellite Copernicus, employed to determine the health of a forest, takes photographs only every five days, covering only ten meters per pixel, as opposed to a Sentinel satellite, commonly used in civil surveillance, which covers thirty centimetres per pixel.
Nonetheless, finding an equilibrium between technology’s ever improving and invasive performance, and the individual’s privacy, will prove delicate. A growing human population and the multiple environmental challenges will certainly make forests our main allies: ecologically, societally and therapeutically. But beyond such considerations, their greatest gift to us may be that extension of time in which they abide and invite us, and where we experience an unmistakable sense of eternity.
[10]Biotic Pump of Atmospheric Moisture as Driver of the Hydrological Cycle in Land/ Makarieva/Gorshkov/2017
[11] “Les arbres sont des capteurs sonores..”/ L’Intelligence des Arbres Puet-elle nous Sauver/2021/Francis Hallé/
[12]Sound Perception in Plants from Ecological Significance to Molecular Understanding/ Trends in Plant Science/July 2023
[13] ‘Murmurer a l’Oreille des Arbres’/Ernst Zurcher/2021
[14]Effects of forest environment (Shinrin-yoku/Forest bathing) on health promotion and disease prevention —the Establishment of “Forest Medicine”/Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine/2022
[15]The Hidden Life of Trees/ Peter Wohlleben/2015
Europe’s closest ally may be its forests
” A culture is no better than its woods.”
W.H.Auden
On a late August day, a boreal forest shared with me its wisdom. A Scandinavian taiga of dark coniferous complexion, wafting a pinene scent into a silvery sky, already cool with impending autumn. I had fallen behind my companions and lain down on a soft bed of lichen and moss. Looking up at the sharp tree outline against the sky, I suddenly realized how easy it would be to die in a forest. A simple, even pleasant formality, a mere floating onward like a bit of pollen. No religious discourse, in my view, could be more illuminating than this.
We do not go to the forest only to hunt, pick berries, walk a pet, but mainly to make peace with our brief destiny, sandwiched between birth and death. The writer Robert Harrison noted in his book translated to Forêts in French: ”Nature knows how to die, but human beings mostly know how to kill, in their incapacity to fulfill their ecology.”?[1]?
Over centuries, Europe’s forests have served as fortuitous graves to soldiers, and outcasts of all types. In today’s Europe, this inadvertent role of the past may have prepared for the growing appeal of cinerary woods, (forest cemeteries). For centuries, too, it has inspired art, literature, poetry, medicine, mysticism, and was a frequent backdrop to folklore and fairytales. Surprisingly or not in our technological time, it continues to be regarded as a place of esoteric forces and elemental egalitarianism.
In the last twenty years, a few European countries have legalized incineration burials in some of their forests, in a felicitous collaboration between environmental conservation and the deceased. All at once ecological, commemorative, aesthetic, idealistically classless, as Harrison points out:”The forest gives to each their due and privileges no one to another’s detriment.”[2]. It must be said that it is also a cheaper alternative to a traditional burial. Cinerary forests have gained favor in Sweden, Finland, Great Britain, France and Germany. During a walk in Fontainebleau forest with disciples of “slow time” I was surprised by the appeal forest burials have for younger generations. A twenty-something girl told me that she wanted this type of burial. It was ecological and reassuring, she said, as if talking about the cottage of her dreams.
But the resurgent fascination for forests goes, literally, beyond the valedictory aspect. Existing well beyond our own span of time, forests evoke both immortality and our distant past as Homo sapiens hunters, (humans began hunting in Europe 350 000 to 400 000 years ago). Nor am I alone in seeking an alternative to our compulsive virtual habits. These, in my opinion, undermine a direct experience with nature, and with life itself. Moreover, today’s enthusiasm for forests demonstrates a rejection of humanity’s ubiquity and a growing attention to other species.
Europe’s last primary forests or patches, thereof, embody the chiaroscuro of marvel and terror that inspired Europe’s fairytales, but also an environment where man does not dominate. If not validated as “primary”, an ancient forest identifies as “old growth”, or one left long to its own regenerative devices, though at some previous point significantly altered by man. However, even a primary forest like Bialowieza, extending between Poland and Belorussia, has been modified by man’s actions, and continues to be so despite legal protection. Nonetheless, a visit to Bialowieza remains a unique experience. One walks among multi-centenary trees surrounded by luminescent mosses, giant mushrooms, wildflower carpets, limpid pools in which European bison drink. The arboreal maze displays an antediluvian splendor rarely seen in Europe nowadays. Unlike an American Northwest counterpart, whose overpowering beauty distances itself from the human psyche, Europe’s primary forest seems to have an anthropic sensitivity and to preserve a collective memory in dendriform archives.
Even the more common and accessible “secondary” forests can offer to an increasing number of trekkers, that pervasive wisdom of a Master Yoda, and that laboratory of heuristic self-discovery. Science has even found that secondary forests defend the planet more efficiently than more ancient ones against the previsions of a global temperature increase, (0.5 to 1.5C by 2050).
Europeans feel viscerally close to forests that have witnessed and inspired so much of their history and culture. They perceive within them a sagacity and lyricism that has inspired much of their poetry and literature; and seems to offer a portal to another dimension, like the mirror evoked by the writer Jorge Borges.
I. Another dimension
The formula “return to the forest’” crops up noticeably these days, as solution to a broad range of concerns, be they cosmetic, cultural, or socio-psychological. As if Europe were endorsing those words of W.H. Auden:” A culture is no better than its woods.”
Paris hosted in March 2025 several highly popular conferences on European forests, focused on ecology, yet with a cultural undertone. The overall message was that we cannot live without ‘real’ forests, by contrast with industrially purposed monocultures. The public was advised to expand its relationship to forests beyond the recreational, to “a way of life”. Environmental professionals were warned against imposing punitive and discouraging rules of environmentalism on that same public. The forest, implicitly presented as a living entity, was sunscreen to the planet’s crust, maker of rain, purifier of air and water. In short, an essential ally to our survival.
The twentieth-century anthropologist Gregory Bateson, had observed among indigenous people a close alliance such as the one recently propounded for Europeans. Tribal people acknowledged forest entities with which they collaborated respectfully. By the same token, demonstrating advanced environmental knowledge which, Bateson argued, obliterated western assumptions of their superstition. The anthropologist Philippe Descola[3] finds a similar collaboration between forest and Amazonian people. In fact, the same association with nature existed among Europe’s pagan Slavic, Celtic, Baltic, Sami-Finnish, Norse and Graeco-Roman people; surviving somewhat alongside later Judeo-Christian traditions.
In the sixteenth-century Europe developed an approach to nature that synthesized Judeo-Christian thought with a combination of Kabbalah and Neo-Platonism, replacing materialist logic with the notion of a pervasive divinity giving impetus to all things. The philosopher/physician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, developed similar ideas through Hermetism and Arab astrological magic. The Venetian Franciscan, Francesco Giorgi, in his De Harmonia Mundi, used a numerical value system through which God’s name was found to mean “tree of life”.
Kabbalistic esoterism believed in a correspondence between nature and a cosmos ruled by spirits and angels. A concept that has recently been partially upheld by the discovery that trees react to their immediate surroundings and pulse to phases of the sun and moon according to the earth’s tilt and orbit around the sun.[4] Sixteenth-century occultist John Dee described this connection between nature and the cosmos as “one temple”. For the physician Robert Fludd, too, the earth was microcosm to the universe’s macrocosm. For the astrologer Nostradamus, the sun transmitted its divinity to nature.
The current tendency to amplify nature beyond mere ecology seems to echo sixteenth century esoterism, and the Louvres’ recent exhibition on the Habsburg Emperor Rodolphe II came as no surprise. In his keen interest for nature, Rodolphe II created a ‘garden of trees’ around his Prague palace and, with an equal fascination for esoterism, surrounded himself with the likes of the philosopher heretic Giordano Bruno, the theologian Johann Pistorius, his court mathematician Johann Kepler. The latter associated magic to a science, unable, alone, to elucidate nature’s mystery.
European literature is routinely inspired by the forest. It has used it as refuge for star-crossed lovers, as the abode of both madness and lucidity, as in Balzac’s short story Adieu. In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent it is a lawless dark force. In medieval literature, the quintessential space for quests and exploits. In German literature, it is a place of ultimate freedom and loneliness, the “Waldeinsamkeit” of a German’s communion with his forest.
Poetry and visual art thrive on that sylvan environment, called “the eighth continent” by the bio-engineer Pieter Defrennes, (specifically referring to the forest canopy). Both art forms celebrate the beauty of ancient trees and forests. For cruelly disadvantaged humans on that count, tree species like bristlecone, cypress, olive – attaining thousands of years of age -, seem to possess quasi supernatural powers.
Well before science, poetry intuited that, like the human psyche, trees were reactive, communicative, competitive as well as collaborative; it evoked a forest , idyllic before man’s interference, in Harriet Annie Wilkins The Forest River; or a companionable backdrop to man’s romantic and political disputes, as in Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.
The visual arts of Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder, or Eugene Viala, show the anthropomorphic individuality of trees and our symbiosis with them. Aegidius Sadeler’s trees resemble our nervous systems or brains. The contemporary artist Martin Soto Climent makes that analogy even more evident. Pierre-Luc Poujol turns tree segments into magical dimensions. Agustin Ibarrola, painting directly onto trees in the forest of Oma in Biscay, seems to reaffirm their ancient totemic role.
But it is perhaps the historical dimension of European forests that brings them closest to Europeans. The 2003 Vienna Declaration, in its Living Forest Summit officialized the cultural and historical value of certain European forests. Some of these, pocked by artillery, fertilized by the spattered blood of soldiers, like the Argonne forest of World War I, had experienced extreme fighting. Other forests have much older memories, like Teutoburger forest that still honors the 9 AD Germanic victory over the Roman army. Forests have indeed been used by the military to confuse the enemy. From the sixteenth- to the nineteenth- century, the Habsburg Empire relied on its southeastern forests to stop the Turkish invasion. Even after forest has regrown over such historical sites, memory endures. During WWII, people summarily executed and buried in communal pits in the Slovenian forest of Kocevsko are still visited there.
But the forest can also transcend the horrors of battle by opening ‘a space in between’ and altering time into a phantasmagory described by David Jones’ In Parenthesis, and by Julian Gracq in Un balcon en Forêt.
As humanity seeks less the warmth of human contact than it once did, it comes to favor and find isolation from its peers through distant traveling, extreme hiking, or simply, ear buds….. Paradoxically, technology provides both anti-social modalities and constant contact with others, at the risk of further cheapening human relations. Surrounded, as they are, by human agitation and noise, city-dwellers are more likely to look for solace in the forest, if only for brief antidotal periods, against their virtual addictions and the ostensible ‘rat race’.
One may wonder how much further humanity’s anti-social trends will draw it back to the forest as a panacea. In his book Parmi les Arbres[5], Alexis Jenni poses the question:” What is this other way of being alive? It is to be immortal, to have no limits, to not know exactly what an individual is.”
The UN has pronounced the 21st of March as ‘Forest Day’. But after centuries of intense forest management, the humbling discovery is that nature does not need us, we need it. Beyond fresh air, clean water, building materials, it is, more essentially, the slow tempo of tree life, its cyclical resurrection over centuries, millennia, and an organic complexity previously misunderstood, that compel us to realize how far we have erred from nature. The intricate collaborations found between forest organisms, indications of some form of forest consciousness, fill us with remorse and fascination.
We are now living in that inter-glacial Holocene period begun 11,700 years ago, and part of the Quaternary Ice Age ‘s begun 2.6 million years ago. Vast climatic changes within that period have made forests expand and recede. Already during the previous Miocene (23 million to 5.333 million years ago), hornbeam, birch, willow, pine, spruce, juniper, cedar, oak, elm, grew alongside our ape-like antecedents. Though we typically imagine Europe then densely covered by untouched forests, research conducted by the Danish Aarhus University discovered that forests were in fact more open. Looking back115 000 to 120 000 years, to the Eem interglacial period, its research found a warm, moist climate favoring large herbivores, (rhinoceros, elephant, bison and horse) that reduced the forest cover by 50% to 75%. Some five to six thousand years ago, Homo sapiens initiated his own clearing through shifting agriculture and livestock fodder. If Europe’s central and northern regions remained mostly untouched by1000 BC, western and southern European forests had already shrunk in size.
Europe’s primary forests are rare today, and excluding Russia, represent 1.4 million hectares, or 0.7% of the total European forest cover; that surface, partly composed of discontinuous patches of up to 300 hectares. Often hard to locate, (most primary forests are in remote or mountainous areas), they can also be hard to distinguish between ‘virgin’ and ‘old-growth’. Western Europe is therefore cautious to identify primary forest at the lower end of its ‘primary’ spectrum. Apart from the celebrated forest of Bialowieza, of which only 20% is considered truly primary on the Polish side, 30% on the Belorussian side, the University of Berlin has recently attempted to map lesser known primary forests across Europe. In its assessment, the map makes allowance for persistent logging, mainly in Eastern Europe. The oldest forests are found in Scandinavia,; in the Slovakian Carpathians, the Zofin forest in the Czech Republic, Romania’s Isvoarele Nerei forest, Ukraine’s Uholka-Shyrokyi Luh forest, Austria’s Rothwald forest, Slovenia’s Kocevje forest; Germany’s five old growth beech forests.[6] Smaller clusters are found in Bulgaria, the Balkans, Spain, Portugal, France and Switzerland. Of these, 4.3% reach over one thousand hectares, a size allowing for preservation and biodiversity. Countries like Latvia, Moldova – by contrast with France and Italy’s detailed forest records – have little to no data, therefore preventing an accurate evaluation of Europe’s full range of primary forest.
So essential are primary forests to biodiversity, that botanist/ biologist Francis Hallé, hopes to reconstitute a 70 000 hectare primary forest at the heart of Western Europe. Existing forests along the French-German border, such as the four hundred hectare Lutzelhardt-Adelsberg Integral Reserve, will serve as base to an endeavor that will take seven hundred years to achieve.
While individual trees of great size remind us of the commanding forests that once covered Europe, these majestic organisms are composed, surprisingly, of insubstantiality: 50% carbon, 44% oxygen, 6% hydrogen, less than 1% of phosphorus, azote, calcium, with traces of other minerals.[7] Propelled upward by the hormone auxin, they punctuate landscapes with a cultural permanence, acquiring an ancestral status in the collective psyche. And at the same time that humanity recoils into virtuality, these trees remind us to re-connect with real life.
Celebrated today for their aesthetic and environmental significance, trees were once regarded in the spirit of pagan belief or religion. The cedar protected women in childbirth; the elm was the tree of elves; the maple brought prosperity; the pine exuded positive energy; the hazel helped to locate water; the hawthorn was portal to the supernatural; the immortal yew was favoured by Druids and magicians. Some of these virtues later proved scientifically accurate: the yew contains anti-cancerous taxols and the pine’s pinenes are also used medically. The hazel contains orientin, possibly another anti-cancerous compound, and other medicinal benefits.
European nations are taking stock of their ‘remarkable’ trees and recording their precise locations, species and ages. Like beauty pageants, regional frontrunners go on to become national assets in trans-European contests. The term ‘remarkable’ applies to one associated to a legend or anecdote. Like the 135 year-old Yorkshire Nellie’s Tree or Love Tree. Or the hundred year-old almond tree in Pecs, Hungary, that became famous as cultural symbol by association with the fifteenth century poet Janus Pannonius. Or the 150 year-old oak at Monte Barbeiro, Portugal, admired for its broad shade on top of an otherwise bare hill. And the 235 year-old Slovakian “Keeper of Great Moravian Secrets”, renowned for its proximity to a revered church.
One cherished individual, the 150 year-old Northumberland “Robin Hood” sycamore, was cut down in 2023 by two individuals, now prosecuted as criminals. Was it cut down for the thrill of desecrating something sacred? Will other ‘remarkable’ trees, likewise, succumb?
Other trees are defined as ‘monumental’ by virtue of age and beauty, some still surrounded by their native forest. I was introduced to the five hundred year-old “Queen of Rog” during a hike to the primary heart of Slovenia’s Rajhenav forest. In the surrounding hush of our introduction, I was tempted to curtsey to the fifty-five meter silver fir. Other such trees include a Swedish spruce, ‘Old Tjikko’ that, with its 9000 years of age or more, compels one to ponder the notion of immortality. The oldest tree in France is said to be a 1800 to 2200 year-old olive tree on Cap Martin. Scotland has the 2000 to 5000 year-old yew of Fortingall. Italy has the1230 year-old pine “Italus”. Crete has a 3000 year-old olive tree.
An eco-political rivalry seems to have emerged among European countries, as to who owns the oldest tree. Such specimens can indeed give rise to national pride and one might even speculate that it participates in a certain rejection of globalism and its perceived undermining of nationhood.
Forests are becoming an ultimate escape from the practical but dull standardization of modern life. In this sylvan world evocative of childhood tales, one may still glimpse some kind of magic:” the shadow of the forest.., that wild condition from which civilization uncertainly derives.”[8] A forest conveys a personality of its own. And though most weekenders will visit the more common “secondary” forest, the good news is that some of these, left to self-regenerate, are regaining an ”old-growth” persona.
In France’s Champagne region, Verzy Forest is famed for the genetic oddity of a stand of twisted and dwarfed beech trees. These possess an enigmatic though benign presence, different from, say, trees in the French/ Swiss forest of Risoux, once a contraband haven and a passage to Switzerland for Jews escaping the Nazis. The Swiss Sihlwald forest, despite its proximity to Zurich, seems a far away, secluded palace for elk, bear, lynx, wolf, wild boar. A Bulgarian Carpathian forest has an aspect that in no way resembles that of France’s forest of Broceliande, for example. The former has a stern, martial mien, while the latter, of Arthurian tradition, seems romantically disheveled, given to water mutterings, spasms of silence, snippets of magic.
Other forests like Germany’s Odenwald, Latvia’s Pokaini , England’s Forest of Dean, flaunt a darker character inhabited by ghosts, devils, perambulating or bleeding stones.
III. Close up on the forest
The historical link between colonialism and tree felling (mainly for ship building) still affects today the size and quality of European forests. Countries with fewer colonies, are now reaping the benefit of owning more “old growth” forest.
To rank officially as a forest, a wooded area must cover at least 0.5 hectares, with trees at least five meters tall. 39% of Europe is covered by forest, composed of 46% coniferous (pine, spruce, fir), of 37% broadleaf (beech, oak, ash), of 17% mixed. Ten per cent of these forests are strictly protected. Three billion more trees are scheduled to be planted in degraded areas. In this way, Europe hopes to reduce gas emissions by 55% by 2050[9]. By 2030, it wants to reach at least 32% renewable energy, (ultimately aiming for 45%). Finland and Sweden have the most forest surface in Europe, covering respectively, 66.2% and 62.5% of their territory. Slovenia, with almost 58%, Austria, with 46.4%, rank highest in Central-Western Europe; followed by Bulgaria,(35.1%), France, (34.7%), Croatia, (34.3%). The UK, (13.5%) and Ireland,(11.4%) rank lowest. Since 2000, Europe’s total forest has increased by 5.5%,(8.3 million hectares). Ireland, France, Cyprus and Italy have led this increase.
While in the Amazon, two Russian field scientists, A.M. Makarieva and V. G. Gorshkov,[10] discovered that, contrary to previous understanding, trees cause rain by evaporation (four to five times more evaporation occurs over a forest), not the atmosphere itself; leafy or deciduous forests producing greater moisture than coniferous ones.
An auspicious concurrence exists between ecology and the public’s aesthetic preference for mixed forest which is gradually replacing monoculture forest. The latter, introduced in the eighteenth century, and continued until today, is now considered environmentally hazardous. Germany’s Harz spruce forest, decimated by the bark beetle, exemplifies the dire consequences of monoculture, causing a 10% loss of Germany’s forest. Mixed forests, to the contrary, effectively enrich the soil and perform better as ‘carbon sinks’. Europe’s 39% forest cover has yet to reach the ‘carbon sink’ goal of 13.22 billion tons, (equivalent to 378 million tons per year). Success will depend on a combination of agricultural reforms, expanding forests and improving their quality.
While for a time, Europe distanced itself from pre-Christian paganism, placing nature firmly under human aegis, it is once again showing a certain reverence for the forest, Recent scientific revelations about tree life may partly be the cause of this change:
“Trees perceive sounds.”[11]
“Sound produced by humans (i.e. highway or industrial noise) may prevent plants from perceiving important environmental information.”[12]
Such findings lead to taking into consideration a forest’s well-being. To reduce stress on soil and vegetation, some loggers prefer to return to horse and manpower instead of using heavy modern machinery. In the documentary/ interview To whisper in the ear of trees, forestry engineer13] Ernst Zürcher corroborates such changes with the story of a Florida orange grower who, by playing bird and insect recordings among his unproductive trees, restored them to vigour.
This scientifically ‘sensitive’ approach to forest has found support among contemporary European Druids. In the 1960s and 70s, ancient pagan beliefs regained popularity, influenced by America’s movement ‘Nature- as- way- of- life’, as put forth in Bron Taylor’s book Deep Green Religion. But while the American movement leaned towards environmentalism, Europe’s enduring paganism, labelled “neo-paganism” stuck to its spiritual traditions. Celtic Druidism had revered Cernunnos, the horned god of forests, while Baltic-Finnic paganism had looked to Tapio, a similar divinity, and the Norse to the tree Yggdrasil…Today’s Druidic groups continue those traditions and are officially listed under the umbrella organization OBOD (order of Bards, Ovates and Druids). In one such group in Burgundy, Philippe Greffet regularly hosts a jovial and epicurean bunch of Druids, and believes that we would do best to live among trees so as to connect with vital sky and earth energies. A notion that struck me as remarkably in tune with science’s more recent revelations about tree life. Trees thrive thanks to miles of mycorrhizal filament networks underground, supplying and transferring water and sugars. Above ground, they connect, by photosynthesis, with the sun and react to tides and celestial movement. My walk in a Brittany forest, with the Druid Taliesin, closely resembled Shinrin-Yoku, or ‘forest bathing’, a therapy born in Japan against ‘technostress’, (i.e. too much screen time). Adopted in Europe during the Covid crisis, Shinrin-Yoku has gained ground as a natural remedy for high blood pressure, stress, cancer, frayed nerves, sleeplessness.[14] Thus, is the forest gradually becoming a place of medical and spiritual therapy. Mindful of this, my friend Laura gently guides her Shinrin-Yoku groups in Fontainebleau forest, well beyond fresh air walks or environmental lecturing, into a playfully esoteric relationship with the forest. Enchantment seems to dwell all around us. Her approach rests on the science of ecologists like Suzanne Simard who, in her writings, has put forth notions of ‘mother’ trees and family groupings, using terms which intentionally foster a greater relatability to forests. Likewise, the silviculturist, Peter Wohlleben, in his book The Hidden Life of Trees,[15] promotes the idea of a forest being, capable of feeling and some form of thought process. Such a notion had previously been expressed by D.H Lawrence in his short story Saint Mawr: “They smell to me more alive than people. These trees hold their bodies hard and still, but they listen with their leaves.”
The biologist Rupert Sheldrake ventures further into that wondrous possibility of a conscious forest by proposing the theory of “morphic resonance”. His theory suggests that trees reproduce patterns, relying on a collective memory that can learn and adapt. His hypothesis is that, since reliance on genetic coding represents only 5 to 10 % of the process, a tree’s capacity to reproduce a form, (leaf, bark…etc), is far from just mechanistic.
It is perhaps with greater urgency than elsewhere that the ‘old continent’ seeks a new societal reference/reverence. Elements of its Judeo-Christian background are allying with ancient beliefs in response to a growing environmental awareness: a trend that aspires to a better social cohesion as societies grow more heterogenous. Forests become focal points of national pride, as in the German “Kulturlandshaft”(cultural landscape), yet spared the socio-cultural exclusion once found in the Third Reich’s “lebensraum” (living space);instead, offering an inherently harmonizing force through the existence of what the folklorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl called the “eternal forest”.
Forests are not yet entirely integrated to a city dweller’s daily life, as the Druid Philippe Greffet would have it, and one must travel to reach them. By observing a city-state like Singapore, however, and its audacious vegetalisation incorporating wildlife, (with a resident otter population), one may envision how far Europe’s historical cities might go.
The “rule of 3-30-300” requires that each city individual be able to see at least three trees from where he lives, with access to 30% tree canopy within 300 meters of his residence. This has been traditionally achieved by planting trees along streets, in squares and in other such standard, often symmetrical ways. But these efforts submit to the city format rather than reshape it.
The main goal behind foresting large cities has been to reduce the ‘island heat’ effect. In the 1970s,the botanist Akira Miyawaki suggested growing miniature forests, (as small as three square meters), at the heart of urban centers with the added goal of alleviating visual stress. Such mini forests, densely planted in optimal soil, with a great diversity of regional vegetation, were left to develop by themselves. Their trees grew faster (up to ten times faster) than in larger, natural woods. Europe has since embraced this concept with companies born in the last decade, like Boomforest in France, Citizen Forest in Germany, fostering both enjoyment and a new kind of neighbourhood involvement.
The urban foresting momentum is underway. The mayor of Paris has recently planted a woodland with thick undergrowth in front of the Hotel de Ville and planned another around the Palais Garnier. One already covers Paris’ circular Place de Catalogne. Milan has created in its centre a 16.8-hectare green space called Citylife, comprising some woods. Prague was nominated in 2025 for best urban forest. Oslo enjoys a 72.03% forest cover. Berlin and Rome top the list of best wooded cities in Europe.
But one may ask: will urban forests transform our European cities beyond recognition? Some of us, after all, cherish the traditional urban format. Will cities such as Paris, Dublin or Barcelona end up looking more like Tolkien’s Lothlorian? Will we live like forest elves, in the constant shade of trees, amidst smells of moss and mushroom? Will we glimpse our city’s familiar perspectives and monuments through the branches of woodland architectures?
It seems safe to say that, for the near future, countryside forests will continue to supply the main escape from the ever-tightening squeeze of urban agglomerations and modern life. Those forests will continue to provide nature’s peaceful sounds and blissful solitude, perhaps even, for some, supranatural perceptions. It would be unfortunate, therefore, if such spaces were marred or taken from us under the guise of environmental monitoring and safety concerns. François Caron, head of the company Goodforest, for the sustainable management of forests, reassures me. The satellite Copernicus, employed to determine the health of a forest, takes photographs only every five days, covering only ten meters per pixel, as opposed to a Sentinel satellite, commonly used in civil surveillance, which covers thirty centimetres per pixel.
Nonetheless, finding an equilibrium between technology’s ever improving and invasive performance, and the individual’s privacy, will prove delicate. A growing human population and the multiple environmental challenges will certainly make forests our main allies: ecologically, societally and therapeutically. But beyond such considerations, their greatest gift to us may be that extension of time in which they abide and invite us, and where we experience an unmistakable sense of eternity.
Stephanie V Sears © 2025
[1] “La nature sait mourir, mais les êtres humains savent surtout tuer, dans leur incapacité a réaliser leur écologie.»
[2] “La forêt donne a chacun son dû et ne priviligie personne aux dépends d’un autre.” Robert Harrison/Forêts/2018
[3] Philippe Descola/La Croix/ March 2025
[4] See Ernst Zürcher
[5] ‘Parmi les arbres : essai de vie commune,éditions Actes Sud/ 2021.
[6] Heinrich National Park, Kellerwald-Edersee National Park,Jasmund National Park, Serrehn Forest, Grumsin Forest.
[7] Ernst Zurcher/Les Arbres entre Visible et Invisible/2016
[8] Robert Harrison/Forêts/1992 /2008“ l’ombre de la foret…, cet état sauvage dont la civilisation n’est qu’un dérivé incertain. »
[9]2022 EU statistics
[10] Biotic Pump of Atmospheric Moisture as Driver of the Hydrological Cycle in Land/ Makarieva/Gorshkov/2017
[11] “Les arbres sont des capteurs sonores..”/ L’Intelligence des Arbres Puet-elle nous Sauver/2021/Francis Hallé/
[12] Sound Perception in Plants from Ecological Significance to Molecular Understanding/ Trends in Plant Science/July 2023
[13] ‘Murmurer a l’Oreille des Arbres’/Ernst Zurcher/2021
[14] Effects of forest environment (Shinrin-yoku/Forest bathing) on health promotion and disease prevention —the Establishment of “Forest Medicine”/Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine/2022
[15] The Hidden Life of Trees/ Peter Wohlleben/2015
By Stephanie Sears • added recently on London Grip, ecology, year 2025 • Tags: ecology, Stephanie V Sears