Green is the colour of happiness

According to this wonderfully thought-provoking book, human attachment to plants was much more evident in the 19th century than it is now. In those days people showed genuine wonder at their ‘strange existences and unquantifiable powers’, especially the British, who fashioned the most ambitious glass building of the age —the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park — drawing on the weird architecture of the amazonica lily as a blueprint.

Richard Mabey suggests that these are more prosaic times, where trees are invariably seen as primary producers, economic heavy-lifters or practical oxygen-supply operatives, or merely as a vegetative background to the planet’s real agents: ourselves and other animals. In short the green stuff is underestimated and we need to rediscover what he calls the ‘intentions, inventiveness and individualities’ of plants.

Perhaps, before dismissing our own times, we should recall a figure like Balin who, in the winter of 1996, lived up an old oak in protest against the proposed bypass around the then silently wooded outskirts of Newbury.