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In his 2021 bestseller The Book of Trespass, Nick Hayes helped us jump the walls that keep us from the vast majority of the English countryside —exposing the way in which centuries of enclosure laws have walled off our land and rivers. The book brought new energy to the Right to Roam movement with its central challenge; to view the British landscape not merely as a set of postcard views, but as a living site of historical struggle, exclusion and democratic potential.
Now, in The Medicine Tree: Repairing the Rotten Roots of England, Nick turns his focus from who owns the land to what that system of ownership has done to us collectively. Tracing the connection between ecological destruction, private capital, and often-ignored colonial crimes, he sets out a vision for healing both soil and society. Refusing nostalgia, The Medicine Tree asks how we might mend an island poisoned by disavowal and division—inviting us to dismantle the boundaries, both physical and imagined, that keep us from a sense of belonging.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK OF TRESSPASS
'Brilliant, passionate and political . . . The Book of Trespass will make you see landscapes differently'
Robert Macfarlane
'A remarkable and truly radical work, loaded with resonant truths'
George Monbiot
PRAISE FOR THE MEDICINE TREE
This book elegantly weaves between a diaristic account of nine months moored on the Thames and a sprawling, granular and global history of the politics and spirituality of land. Both Nick's accounts of the past and the contemporary are shot through with righteous anger but countered by his tender, visceral descriptions of the body within nature that makes the reader ache to swim naked and walk barefoot in the dew. Every chapter, based on the months from September to May, demonstrates Haye's profound attachment to community, and are a clarion call for the vital rediscovery, or invention, of an Albion kinship of the land and the rivers.-
Leah Gordon
Dazzling in scope, effervescing with insights, richly illustrated, lyrically written and fired by a yearning to remake England anew. Hayes has delved deep into our buried radical history and forgotten folklore and unearthed a treasure trove.
Guy Shrubsole
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