Had I highlighted the thought-provoking and important passages in this book as I read it, it would be almost fully colored. But in a way, that works against itself: there's too much worth remembering to remember much at all. So this will bear re-reading someday. (Fortunately, it is a slim volume.)
The other thing that makes it so hard to summon up the crystals of philosophy is Fowles prose. It weaves and writhes like a honeysuckle vine. I had to read almost every sentence multiple times, dropping out parenthetical clauses, in order to firmly connect subject to predicate to object. Whether this is a feature or a bug, I am unsure. ( )

This is a collection of some sixty photographs from Frank Horvat's series "Portraits of Trees", accompanied on the facing pages by an essay by Fowles in which he reflects on the ways he and Horvat and other creative artists engage with nature in general and trees in particular, and how impoverished we are when we only see nature in a reductive, scientific, utilitarian way. It's sometimes quite difficult to focus on his quite abstract arguments when you have Horvat's gorgeous images leaping out at you from the opposite page, but it's worth it: there's more to it than holistic seventies tree-hugging.

It is quite amusing the way Fowles insists on the complexity and interelatedness of the forest whilst Horvat is doing everything he can to sterilise and isolate his specimens. You sense that his ideal tree is the one standing by itself in a snowy French field where there is no clear distinction to be seen in the background between earth and sky, whereas Fowles imagines himself in the densely wooded dells of the Undercliff at Lyme Regis. Of course, that's an oversimplification, Horvat admits a few groupings of trees and Fowles also talks about his father's immaculately pruned fruit trees, but they don't seem to have a huge amount in common. ( )

Frank Horvat’s distinguished photographic essays have earned him a reputation among the French comparable with that of Robert Capa and Henri Cartier- Bresson. He himself modestly describes his art as that of ‘notpressing the button´ but the images in this book are the result of countless journeys across the continents of Europe and North America and many seasons of painstaking labour. When these hauntingly beautiful studies of trees were first exhibited in France they were hailed as ‘an achievement in the realm of photography that makes his work equal the highest ‘ moments of painting: and they attracted the novelist John Fowles with their powerful simplicity and their ability to see nature as even paintings could not: ‘In many ways painters did not begin to see nature a whole until the camera saw it for them; and already, in this context, had begun to supersede them.´ John Fowles and Frank Horvat are in no sense ordinary artists, and The Tree cannot be appreciated simply as a picture book of trees. The words and images of these master craftsmen fuse into a grand design that draws us beyond the labels we attach , unconsciously to these familiar objects — trees — and makes us see the very tree at our doorstep in a new and more penetrating light. Fowles looks upon trees, the wood, as the best analogue of prose fiction, symbolizing the ‘green man’ or wild part of our psyche, and presents them as a key to the proper understanding of his novels. In a series of moving recollections involving both his childhood and his work as a mature artist, he explains the impact of nature on his own life, and warns urban ‘civilized’ man of the deeper and more subtle dangers that attend his traditional rejection of the wild.
John Fowles was bom in England in 1926 and educated at Bedford School and the University of Oxford, where he read French. He has been a full'-time writer, since 1963, the year in which The Collector brought him international fame as a novelist. The book was a best-seller ' in Britain and America and has been published in fourteen languages. After The Aristos, ‘a self-portrait in ideas’ (1965), came The Magus (1966), a Book Society Choice in Britain and a US. Literary Guild Choice. Both this novel and The Collector were filmed. The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in Lyme Regis where John Fowles now lives, followed in 1969 and became ' the best-seller of the season on its appearance in the US. In 1974 three further books were published: his adaptation of Perrault’s Cendrillon of 1697, with illustrations by Sheilah Beckett; a collection of novellas entitled The Ebony Tower; and Shipwreck, which is based on photographs taken by a family of islanders who recorded the sea disasters around the coast of the Scillies. A second book relating to the Scillies, Islands, was published in 1978 with photographs by Fay Godwin. His most recent novel, Daniel Martin, was on the Sunday Times best-seller list for many weeks and was a full Book of the Month Club Choice in America.
Frank Horvat was born in Italy in 1928 and studied drawing at the Brera Academy. His first photographic essay was published by Epoca in 1951 and his first colour photograph was used by that magazine as a cover. Although he has lived and worked in France for many years, he travels extensively and has produced work for most of the leading European and American publications. He was the first to apply the 35mm camera and reportage techniques to fashion photography, creating a newand more realistic style which profoundly influenced the development of this field in England, France and the USA. In 1961 he published two books, Television and Strip-Tease. More recently he has devoted his attention to making experimental films in addition to his work in reportage and fashion. The exhibition, ‘Trees; was held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Nantes in 1977. ( )

Fowles confounded my expectations: of the 101 pages in my edition, perhaps 12 are given over to a description of woodland and trees, and those twelve provide him with further material to ponder the relationship between people, as individuals and as societies, and nature. Starting with a meditation on the differences between his own and his father's views of nature, Fowles takes in art, science, religion, and the essential ineffability of existence. ( )

This book is a wonderful antidote to those who see nature as a "system" or a "machine" that is somehow apart from us. Fowles sees the natural world instead as a community that we're inextricably bound up with. Trees are companions, even friends. A profound meditation:

"The particular cost of understanding the mechanism of nature, of having so successfully itemized and pigeon-holed it, lies most of all in the ordinary person's perception of it, in his or her ability to live with and care for it--and not to see it as challenge, defiance, enemy." ( )