Beech: The Fall and Rise of a Forest

Combining art with elegy, Beech is the perfect gift for nature lovers, walkers, bedside philosophers, armchair travelers, and anyone else who likes short reads and beautiful photographs.Once upon a time, New England was mostly forest. We cut it down. Now it’s back. In gorgeous photos and short evocative essays, AgathaO’s Beech ventures into an exciting world reigned by trees and water. Inhale it, see, listen, and relax. Forget the sound of the chainsaw for a moment… but not too long. AgathaO - alter ego of historian and photographer Pleun Bouricius - sees the world as an adventure. She stumbles through it, clutching her camera, along with her much more surefooted hound, who leaps across stone wall and blowdowns and circles among the trees, hardly ever getting entangled in the barbed wire left by generations of farmers. While no one was looking, the New England forest grew back in the 20th century. Now, it’s under threat of death by a thousand cuts - development, solar farms, and hordes of imported insects. AgathaO asks the reader to love the forest first, and then think about what it means to do so. Comprised of photographs and essays from AgathaO, com, Beech combines history, science, and philosophy in personal essays and evocative photographs, and bears witness to the importance of walking, of taking the time to just be in the woods and enjoy it- in all seasons and all weather. To be free to fall, get dirty, get up, walk this way and that, and at every turn be reminded of an entire world that exists just for itself, fragrant, smelly, gorgeous in all its ways, that is happiness.