Take three countries where trees and humans compete for space: Japan with its ancient conifer forests and multilayered subtropical island habitat; Britain, where the trees that made it back after the ice age – birch, aspen, oak, ash and lime – hang on, barely, in combes and ghylls, hedgerows and deer parks; and Canada, with its boreal forests of pine, fir and spruce stretching from the tundra to the sea. Take all these distinct environments, add ten thousand years of distinct human history and three authors, and you end up with three very different books.

Tree by Aya Kōda (sensitively translated by Charlotte Goff) is a whimsical masterpiece of acute observations by a great author at the end of her life (she died in 1990). Physical frailty means that Kōda struggles to visit the great trees of Japan, but even when she has to be carried up steep and narrow paths, she responds with the alert sensitivity of a sparrow. Her visit to Jindai-zakura, a cherry tree about two thousand years old, is characteristic: ‘It made for a stark comparison: the infant blossoms and the ancient feet. These gnarled, boulder-like roots were allowing the gorgeous, delicate flowers to bloom high above. You could call the tree beautiful, or maybe dependable, but there was another feeling … which [it] was impossible to ignore. Fear.’

Kōda is describing trees – some individually, some as a species – as they appear to the people of the eleventh most populated country in the world, where the continuity of culture and custom was strictly enforced until the end of the Edo period. Japan is probably the only post-industrial