Outdoors books are a great indoor pastime

WE’RE getting to the time of year when book tokens are in circulation, so I’m going to mention a few recently published books with an outdoors theme that I have enjoyed.

Champion Trees of Britain and Ireland, by Owen Johnson, is the new handbook from TROBI, the Tree Register of the British Isles. It’s not a book that you’d read in one session, but it is an invaluable reference work for anyone with a serious interest in trees. It draws from a database, assembled over 20 years, of 190,000 notable trees growing in Britain and Ireland. It includes every tree that is exceptional for its size, age, historical associations or rarity. British trees have been better surveyed than Irish ones, but a substantial portion of the book deals with this country.

There are 200 colour photographs. Part one is a tree flora listing all native and exotic trees alphabetically. Part two is a guide to visiting the finest specimens — the Irish section is divided into the four provinces. There is also much other reference information. This includes a chapter on how to measure a tree, so if you know the whereabouts of an unrecorded specimen you can measure it yourself and submit your results for inclusion in the database and, possibly, in a subsequent edition of the handbook.