Cover reveal!

And tree 2 - the banyan tree

I’m excited today to be able to reveal the cover of my book, To Hear the Trees Speak. A cover has to encapsulate so much about a book. It needs to be able to stand out on a crowded bookshop table and call out to the passing reader, ‘Pick me up’. It needs to catch the eye of the reader browsing online, often condensed down to a thumbnail image. It needs to convey key themes of the book in a way that is complementary to the title. It has to give the reader a feel for the type of the book it is and evoke an emotional response, to make that first connection before they even look at the words inside.

Given the subject matter of my book, trees clearly had to feature. I also wanted it to communicate the sense of the journey that I had undertaken to visit the trees. My publisher had raised the point about including a human figure as the majority of books with trees as a subject only have trees, and it is my developing relationship with the trees which is at the heart of the story. So that was the start of a brief.

I had recently been working with a Lewes-based artist, Michelle Hockey, on an illustrated poetry book published by my nature writing group, Chalk & Stream Collective in collaboration with Love Our Ouse. She had created 16 wonderful lino-cut prints to illustrate the poems we had written about the Winterbourne Stream, a rare chalk stream which runs through Lewes. I shared some of her work with Jamie, my publisher at Bedford Square Publishers and suggested that perhaps Michelle could create an illustration for the cover. He loved her work and agreed to commission her.

I met with Michelle one Saturday morning in the café of the local independent cinema to discuss ideas. I shared with her our thoughts. She had had some initial ideas too, and I said that I liked including the roots of the tree as they are such an important part of the way that trees communicate. We agreed that having strong colours was crucial in creating stand-out. I shared with her a picture of the beech tree which is the feature of the last chapter of the book, and also a picture of myself taken by partner to use as the basis for the figure amongst the tree.

When Michelle shared her cover illustration, my publisher and myself both felt that it was exactly what we were looking for. There was some tweaking in terms of positioning of the trees to allow for the title, and then it was over to the designer, Ifan Bates, to work on typographic layouts.

I’m excited to be able to reveal it here. And can’t wait to see it in real life on the cover of an actual real-life copy of the book.

If you are tempted to get your hands on the beautiful cover artwork, then the book is available for pre-order now in the UK, from your local bookshop and all of the usual online bookshops, including Bookshop, Hive, Waterstones and Amazon. It is 25% off at the moment on Hive (which supports local bookshops) and Amazon, so now’s the chance to grab a pre-order deal! (The cover image hasn’t updated on some of the sites yet - apparently it takes some time to filter through). Publication date is 8 May in the UK. The book will follow in Australia and New Zealand in June.

Pre-orders really help in getting a book into bookstores and onto lists - and you’ll have something to look forward in a couple of months of time! If you do order now, that is hugely appreciated, thank you!

Tree 2 -The banyan tree

Given that the cover has grabbed the limelight, I’ll keep it short on the banyan tree. I spent almost a month in India, with most of that time at Sadhana Forest, planting trees to help re-establish the Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest (TDEF). I spent some time there listening to a young banyan tree, as well as visiting the mother banyan tree which is at the heart of the Auroville community. To find out what the tree had to say, it’s all in the book!

A young banyan tree at Sadhana Forest

A good reminder for researchers

Honouring of trees

Just looking at the pictures takes me back to that warmth!

Prompt for the week:

• At Sadhana Forest, the volunteering work there is known as seva - which is a Sanskrit word means ‘selfless service.’ Journal on what the word service means to you and how you can be of service to the trees and more-than-human beings, as well as to humans? You can always try this sitting under a tree - perhaps sit for five minutes first and then write.

  As always, I welcome your thoughts.