There is a hidden wood near Guy Shrubsole’s home that glows with a verdant luminosity all year round. Its trees are familiar oaks but rendered stunted and strange by Atlantic gales and upland soils. To their contorted limbs cling lichens, mosses, liverworts and ferns – hundreds of multicoloured species that resemble coral reefs, with bewitching names from string-of-sausages to witches’ whiskers.
Shrubsole’s discovery of a surviving fragment of British rainforest close to his new home in Devon inspired him to write a book, The Lost Rainforests of Britain, which is published next week. “There’s something so alluring about this weird, gnarled, dripping, moss-encrusted ecosystem,” he says. “The fact that it sounds exotic but thrives very specifically on British weather is really magical. I wanted to re-enchant more people with the magic of the rainforest we have left in this country.”
