Struggling with mental health, Merlin and his wife Lizzie leave the bustle of London and return home to a Cornish hill farm, where they discover that the damaged woods surrounding the farm are one of the UK’s last fragments of temperate rainforest. As they fall more in love with the rainforest, so begins a fight to save themselves, their farm and one of the world’s most endangered habitats.
Merlin Hanbury-Tenison is a Cornish conservationist and veteran who founded The Thousand Year Trust, Britain’s rainforest charity. The charity’s mission is to catalyse the movement to triple Britain’s rainforest cover to one million acres in the next thirty years. Along with his wife Lizzie, an entrepreneur and business advisor, Merlin also founded Cabilla Cornwall, a wellness centre on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall which invites others into the healing space of the rainforest. At Cabilla, they’ve hosted and helped over 3,000 people, including NHS nurses, former soldiers with PTSD and businesspeople. His conservation work has been featured in National Geographic, the Guardian and on the BBC. His book, Our Oaken Bones, has been championed across independent and large-scale bookshops alike across the southwest from Land’s End to Exeter.