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The Medicine Tree
  • Published: 1 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837313747
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Nick Hayes
  • RRP: $32.00
Categories:

The Medicine Tree

Repairing the Rotten Roots of England

Formats & editions
Hardback
12 Jan 2027
Audiobook
1 Oct 2026
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A stunning, deeply felt exploration of the struggle between ownership and belonging in England, by the best-selling author of The Book of Trespass

Early one September, Nick Hayes brought his houseboat up the Thames into rural Oxfordshire, mooring opposite a strange tree that towered over the surrounding meadowland. The tree, he would discover, was a hybrid of the eastern cottonwood, brought back from colonial Canada. The land was the Hardwick estate, whose apparently timeless tranquillity – like so much of the English countryside – masks a darker history. Yet Hardwick also tells another, quite different story.

Over the following months, Hayes learns that its rolling hills and fertile valleys are on the front lines of a battle between ownership and belonging. Through a golden autumn, and the frosts and floods of winter and early spring, Hayes explores an estate that, acknowledging the colonial origins of its wealth, has become a haven for those who are both unable and unwilling to be part of a countryside geared towards profit at any cost. Living and working among this extraordinary community of farmers and craftspeople, Hayes contemplates what we have lost in England, as our sense of kinship with the land, and the deep knowledge that arose from it, was destroyed.

Yet, Hayes suggests, if we can learn from the cultures we have exploited, and from the tentative roots being put down in this radical Oxfordshire estate, perhaps we can start to unpick – and even re-enchant – our relationship with the land. The Medicine Tree is a singular act of storytelling and recovery: of giants, gods, witches, trees, horror and hope, of entanglement, reparation and solidarity.
  • Published: 1 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837313747
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Nick Hayes
  • RRP: $32.00
Categories:

About the author

Nick Hayes

Nick Hayes is an award-winning writer, illustrator and land justice campaigner. In 2020 he co-founded Right to Roam, the influential campaign group advocating for public access to nature in England. He is the author of, among others, the Sunday Times best-seller The Book of Trespass and co-editor of Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You. An acclaimed artist, he has published four graphic novels and exhibited across the country, including at the Hayward Gallery. He lives on a canal boat with no fixed address.
portrait photo of Nick Hayes

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Praise for The Medicine Tree

This book elegantly weaves between a diaristic account of nine months moored on the Thames and a sprawling, granular and global history of the politics and spirituality of land. Both Nick's accounts of the past and the contemporary are shot through with righteous anger but countered by his tender, visceral descriptions of the body within nature that makes the reader ache to swim naked and walk barefoot in the dew. Every chapter, based on the months from September to May, demonstrates Haye's profound attachment to community, and are a clarion call for the vital rediscovery, or invention, of an Albion kinship of the land and the rivers

Leah Gordon

Dazzling in scope, effervescing with insights, richly illustrated, lyrically written and fired by a yearning to remake England anew. Hayes has delved deep into our buried radical history and forgotten folklore and unearthed a treasure trove

Guy Shrubsole

An astonishing and revelatory work of reciprocity and re-membering, The Medicine Tree is a purification ritual for the first victim of English colonialism, England herself. As a community moves from dreaming of better to doing better, stories of embedded trauma unfurl on scales that are both epic and intimate. Nature, culture, global and local history, economics, politics and metaphysics have seldom felt so utterly enmeshed. I’m reeling

Amy Jane Beer

The Medicine Tree is many things at once: the glittering journal of a river year; an impassioned mapping of the asymmetries of power, justice and wealth that underlie the English ‘countryside' as surely as strata; the hopeful weaving-into-being of a possible world to come. It stands in a tradition of dissenting English rural writing that includes William Cobbett, Roger Deakin, Colin Ward and Thomas Hardy. Fiercely clever, compassionate and self-interrogating, it lays bare the 'rotten roots of England' -- but also sets out the principles for a progressive politics of place and belonging. At a time when an ethnonationalist far right is on the march, and when the severance between people, land and the larger web of life is deepening disastrously, this is vital, urgent work. Like its predecessor The Book of Trespass, The Medicine Tree will touch hearts, spark debate and inspire change

Robert Macfarlane