One of my common sources for interesting botanical books is Nigel Chaffey’s blog. I do highly recommend checking out his posts. One of his 2025 posts was titled “Wood and cellulose civilized Man.” It led me to choose between two books for 2026 (Ennos – the one I selected – and Perlin – one you might track down if you want to learn yet more about wood). One thing Chaffey mentioned and I mentioned in passing during our January discussion, although I couldn’t remember the source at the time, was a Japanese satellite made of wood. He quoted, “LignoSat, a coffee mug-size satellite made from magnoiia wood, was successfully deployed from the International Space Station (ISS) [(Vajiram)] in December 2024” (Ben Turner). Chaffey continued, “And, if you’re wondering why a wooden satellite, ‘Wood doesn’t burn or rot in the lifeless vacuum of space [Donavyn Coffey], but it will incinerate into a fine ash upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere —making it a surprisingly useful, biodegradable material for future satellites’ (Ben Turner)*.”

And so, we began 2026 with a look at trees primarily through the lens of wood. In some ways, wood is still so much part of our lives that we don’t really think about it. Although we lean toward alternative/electronic materials, we still, for example, read physical books made of paper. Recent research suggests a walk in the woods, sometimes known as forest bathing, is good for our health. Students and hospital patients do better in rooms with windows and views of trees.

Why is this connection so strong? Roland Ennos has some ideas. His 2020 book, The Age of Wood, suggests that the mechanical properties of wood encouraged the hominins to develop the ability to walk upright and eventually come down from the trees. To some extent the branches were analogous to bicycle training wheels, or perhaps above-the-head canes, and provided support as the hominins “walked” through the canopy. The hominins apparently also understood enough of the properties of wood that they were able to bounce along the branches, requiring less energy to get around. Trees provided shelter, tools, and fire/light. How could we not feel connected to them through the millenia? It does bring to mind Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (1964) although his focus was competely contemporary.

I often suggest beginning with an author’s website but I can’t find one for Ennos. I did, however, find this approximately hour long 2024 interview with him about our book. I didn’t listen to all of it but it seems to be a good overview of the book and his interests in wood. Several book club members reported listening to the whole thing and found it to be a good summary of the material covered in the book.

Ennos opened his book with a story of hiking a beautiful but scarily narrow path carved in the side of cliffs in the French Pyrenées. As it turned out, the ‘road of the masts’ told a tale of a need in the mid- to late-1700s for strong tree trunks to make masts for sailing ships. Since this is where it began for Ennos, I thought it would give us context for the book to start there as well, along the Chemin de la Mature.

The foundation of the book rests on understanding the properties of trees that lead to the particular characteristics of wood that make it so important. The following is a talk by Ennos on exactly that topic.
The Structure and Properties of Wood as a Living Material is a 1 hr 19 min zoom talk given on about 15 Nov 2022. He starts talking at about 4:20.

I never realized that primates build nests through understanding how to manipulate branches. Here is a very short video of a baby orangutan building a nest.

Ennos proposes that reliance on wood might also explain how humans might have come to lose their body hair.

Susan, a knowledgable person on the topic and long-time book club member, suggested that alternate, more credible hypotheses have been proposed. I quote from her here:
“in hominins, there is a strong evolutionary relationship between the increase in sweat gland density and the reduction of body hair (fur). This adaptation is widely interpreted as a key mechanism for efficient thermoregulation, particularly in the context of endurance activities like persistence hunting in hot environments. The loss of dense body hair reduced insulation, allowing more effective evaporation of sweat from the skin surface, while the expansion of eccrine sweat gland number and distribution enabled sustained sweating. Genetic evidence supports this link, with regulatory changes in the En1 gene—particularly through human-specific enhancers like ECE18—driving higher eccrine gland density at the expense of hair follicle development. This trade-off suggests a coordinated evolutionary shift: as hair coverage decreased, sweat gland proliferation increased, optimizing cooling capacity for bipedal, diurnal activity in open, arid habitats.
in addition to En1, several other genes are involved in the evolutionary divergence of sweat gland density and hair loss in hominins. The ECE18 enhancer region, which regulates EN1 expression, contains multiple human-specific mutations that increase its activity, leading to higher eccrine sweat gland density. Genes from core developmental pathways such as WNT10A, EDAR, BMP7, and FGF also play roles in ectodermal appendage patterning and are implicated in the coordinated regulation of sweat glands and hair follicles. Variants in LAMA5, KRT14, and ITGB4 influence skin structure and gland morphogenesis. These genetic changes collectively support the hypothesis that human thermoregulatory evolution involved regulatory modifications promoting sweat gland proliferation while reducing hair coverage.”
For references she provided:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_nakedness_and_clothing
and
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-naked-truth-why-humans-have-no-fur/
The Scientific American article is from 2010 and was updated by the author in 2016:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-naked-truth-why-humans-have-no-fur1/

The medieval Norwegian stave churches are quite famous wooden buildings. Although most have been destroyed over time, this link is to one that is a UNESCO site.

Much of the history of wood and civilization seems to revolve around ship building.

When I downloaded this link about a Sutton Hoo archaeological site, I thought it would be about a ship unearthed there. It is true that there was a ship and there are some fleeting glimpses of it but it’s more about archaeological methods today. Who knew a backhoe is an archaeologist’s friend!

I found this video, How a 16th century explorer’s sailing ship works, helpful for understanding terminology as well as some basics of how ships were built and how big they were.

I think, perhaps when we read Sproutlands, we looked as video clips of wooden ships. I’ve included a couple here:
Vasa war ship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD6sPrk7QL4
https://albaola.org/en/shared-history/
vimeo.com/99023292

My recollection from something we read, maybe Sproutlands, was that as part of the various war efforts and need for masts, countries began growing and shaping trees to have wood for future ships. And since it apparently takes about 150 years for the trees to reach the correct size, there are forests and bits of forests around today that weren’t needed for sailing ships by the time the trees matured.
For example, here’s a video about an unused oak forest.

Not all forests with shaped trees have a documented history. Here’s a story of a crooked forest in Poland. One of the possible explanations for the tree shapes was that snow storms in the trees’ youth bent the branches in that way. While largely considered not credible, it did remind me of my early days living in North Carolina. On a trip to the beach with my then-boyfriend, he pointed out “sea pines” and explained they were “c-pines” and that was because they had been bent to that shape during an unusual snow storm. So, maybe….

The next two videos investigate building a cabin out of wood, specifically green wood. Something of a DIYer, Sandy (sawing with Sandy) has a couple videos on building a small cabin out of green wood cut and milled by him on the property. He concludes that warping is just something you have to live with. The interest in green wood is old and Ennos, our book’s author, proposes that it was a lot easier to work green wood than dry wood. And anyone who has tried to cut off a dead tree limb will heartily agree.

Tiny cabin, clearing brush.
Tiny house built with green wood.

Although we didn’t watch it, I had also found this series of four videos (I only have the link to the first one) on how to work with green wood. “Ben Orford invites you into the world of Green woodwork. Using traditional methods, Ben shows you how to split, axe, and prepare a piece of wood, as well as how to use a shaving horse and a lathe to create a finished wooden product, in this 4 part series.”

Definitely not built from green wood, Finland is building a wood city. In fact, I’d say this is just about as far from green wood as you can get, using highly processed, laser-cut treated wood. At some point the question of wood and fire arises. The makers of this video include a response in the first comment (at the time of this posting) following the video.

Why all buildings should be timber.

The use of wood in construction is becoming popular again and any search on “wood house” will generate eye-candy houses or as one of my friends calls it – house porn. But building with wood is serious business and this short video of the 2025 Wood in Architecture Awards features wood in public buildings.

Toward the end of the book, Ennos touched on the human need for trees, often ignored over the past several hundred years. One of the proponents of forest bathing is Dr. Quin Li. Although I flippantly referred to it as ‘a walk in the woods’ as a nod to Bill Bryson’s book on his hike of the Appalachian Trail, in fact there is a growing body of scientific evidence of the many physical and mental health benefits of spending times in a forest. One book club member had just picked up a copy of Li’s book on forest bathing and, of course, there are many other resources online. I would just caution you, in this age of AI slop to be sure you are getting valid information.

The Age of Wood revolves around how the availability of trees and wood has facilitated our ability to transition from primates to humans and develop a civilization that currently relies on metals (and fossil fuels). I thought this example of the trees reclaiming a metal ship seemed a fitting final word…. I found three different videos about it.
Floating forest in Sydney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAxDxp3oUeI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UunTqjaldlc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MZFSL_8HU0