The Wood for the Trees by Richard Fortey wins the Richard Jefferies Society/White Horse Bookshop Writer's Prize

From Marlborough News Online:

John Price, Chairman of the Richard Jefferies Society, announced - "with great pleasure" - that the book which best reflected the spirit of Jefferies' writing was The Wood for the Trees by Professor Richard Fortey ... “With a strong sense of place in Fortey's recording of the passage of the year in the woodland, we felt that the book was a worthy successor to Jefferies' writing.”

And the blurb on Amazon reveals a Liberal connection:

"The woods are the great beauty of this country… A fine forest-like beech wood far more beautiful than anything else which we have seen in its vicinity" is how John Stuart Mill described a small patch of beech-and bluebell woodland, buried deeply in the Chiltern Hills and now owned by Richard Fortey. 

Drawing upon a lifetime of scientific expertise and abiding love of nature, Fortey uses his small wood to tell a wider story of the ever-changing British landscape, human influence on the countryside over many centuries and the vital interactions between flora, fauna and fungi.