Rooted in Adventure: Lady Carnarvon and explorer Levinson Wood on trees, history and The Great Tree Story

I’m delighted to welcome author and explorer Levison Wood to Highclere, where we talk about my great love; trees and his book, The Great Tree Story: how forests have shaped our world.

 Levison shares how studying the Grand Tour at university inspired his lifelong passion for travel and storytelling, from hitchhiking across Europe and Central Asia to serving as an officer in the Parachute Regiment and deploying to Afghanistan. He recalls founding a production company and undertaking extraordinary long-distance walks, including nine months walking the White Nile from its farthest source to the Mediterranean, followed by the length of the Himalayas and other epic routes. 

We explore what drew him to write about trees, especially an experience with the Asháninka in the Amazon and we discuss ancient yews, cedars, redwoods, Highclere’s planting of 22,000 trees and his plans to adapt The Great Tree Story into a feature documentary.

01:05 Grand Tour Roots

03:26 Modern Travel Risks

04:56 Army Years and Afghanistan

05:49 From Soldier to Storyteller

07:31 Walking the Nile

09:06 More Epic Expeditions

10:33 Planning and Logistics

12:31 Highclere Explorer Heritage

14:30 Why Trees Matter

17:32 Ancient Trees and Estate Planting

19:42 Redwoods and Tree Lore

23:29 Trees in Culture and Craft

24:33 Green Man and Next Film

You can hear more episodes of Lady Carnarvon's Official Podcasts at https://www.ladycarnarvon.com/podcast/

New episodes are published on the first day of every month. 

Transcript

Introduction & The Power of Names

Lady Carnarvon: Well, welcome to my podcast. Today, I'm most delighted to be sitting down to talk to a man and author, Levinson Wood, who, as his name suggests, we're going to talk all about trees. There's nothing more I love than the trees here at Highclere. I think although I love the castle, I love the trees and the landscape around equally as much. So welcome, thank you, Levinson, so much for coming.

Levinson Wood: Lady Carnarvon, thank you for having me.

Lady Carnarvon: It's wonderful to have a slightly unusual first name when you're writing, because I think it draws people to you as well, doesn't it?

Levinson Wood: It does. I think as a child, you don't quite appreciate what an unusual name can offer in later life. But certainly as an author, people remember me and recognize me. My rank in the army was Major—Major Wood—which has certain connotations! But we won't go there. I’ve always had a fascination with nature and trees, so it's appropriate now that my latest book is all about that.

The Grand Tour & Historical Travels

Lady Carnarvon: And I gather that when you were at university studying history—and you've just mentioned that your thesis, your main work in presumably your third year, was about the Grand Tour. Funny enough, our smoking room here in Highclere Castle (or Downton Abbey!) is all about paintings associated with the Grand Tour, from going to Venice and to Holland, etc. I would love to have known a bit more about it. One of Geordie’s (my husband's) ancestors was a man called William Pembroke, who was the traveler earl, who spent his life having fun and going around inspecting ruins, as far as I can see. It's very apposite from that particular genre to have then moved on to travel writing, I gather, first of all, and then about trees.

Levinson Wood: Yes. So when I first went to university and started reading history, because I was dead set on joining the army, I was very much interested in political and military history. I always saw social history as a bit woolly.

But one of my tutors, a guy called Dr. Ross Balzaretti, who was a very flamboyant chap of Italian ancestry, convinced me to take up his course in the Grand Tour. I was reading about the likes of your illustrious ancestor, and people like Samuel Johnson and Boswell, and these fascinating characters of the 18th century who went to not just Florence and Rome, but all over Europe.

They were really the first tourists, and they set the scene for mass tourism later on. They were particularly interested in art and the sublime. Switzerland, actually, was the first place that certainly British tourists would go to admire the natural beauty, and that stayed with me.

So much so that when I graduated from Nottingham in 2004, I decided I should go on my own Grand Tour and hitchhike all the way through Europe and Central Asia, all the way to India. I did that on a budget of about £500. It was the start of many great adventures after that.

I remember reading the diaries of all of these young chaps—they were mainly men in those days—and just thinking, actually, psychologically, not a great deal has changed in the last 300 years. So to go off and do my own adventure really started for me what was a fascination with the idea of what we can benefit from travel, sharing stories, and the art of storytelling. That's what I've tried to do over the last 15 years of writing.

Lady Carnarvon: Amazing. And funny enough, it was not always particularly safe to travel in those days, as it probably isn't safe to travel to many parts of the world today. The Second Earl of Carnarvon—Geordie's "how-many" grandfather—was imprisoned in Spain or Portugal, or both. I think he had to be ransomed out by his father! He learned Spanish and Portuguese, and he wrote journals about his travels there. But they were adventurous.

The Second Earl was also in Warsaw during the First Republic of Poland, which was in 1791, making accounts of it. So they were extraordinary people, because it wasn't particularly comfortable traveling in those days. You're using horses, carriages, and ships. It was well before trains or cars.

Levinson Wood: It just took a very long time, didn't it, to get anywhere? Things have obviously changed. One of my first big expeditions was walking the length of the River Nile, and that took me nine months. That was a bit of a flavor into how things used to be done.

But I take my hat off to all of those, particularly the greats of the Age of Exploration, who would go off for two, three, four years at a time with no real—I mean, people would write letters, but it was hit-and-miss whether they actually got to where they were supposed to be. Medically, you didn't have anti-malarials and things like that, so it was a huge risk. Things have definitely improved in that sense, but I've certainly had a few close calls on the way as well.

Lady Carnarvon: I bet you have, yeah.

From the Parachute Regiment to Global Exploration

Lady Carnarvon: So after university and your own Grand Tour, you then joined the army in the Parachute Regiment?

Levinson Wood: I was based in Colchester with 16 Air Assault Brigade. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I spent a year at Sandhurst learning the skills that you need to be an officer in command of men in battle. When I joined in 2005, this was very much amid the War on Terror, so there was a strong chance that we would be deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan. After 12 months having completed my training, I spent a bit of time with my unit, and we then got deployed to Afghanistan and served for several months out there.

Lady Carnarvon: One of my godsons has just joined the Paras. He's in there, and he has been deployed as well. I think his great-grandfather was Pug Ismay—Lord Ismay—who was quite important in the creation of the Paras, wasn't he, at one point?

Levinson Wood: Ah, fascinating. Yes.

Lady Carnarvon: So yes. And then after that, when you left, did you know what you were going to do?

Levinson Wood: I think even before I joined the Paras, I knew that I wanted to travel. I'd done my own little journeys here and there, but for me, the army was a great opportunity to learn new skills and to meet some fascinating people. But my first love was travel, and so I kind of knew when I left—and a lot of people leave at the rank of captain because there aren't that many jobs in the pyramid of the hierarchy.

I never saw it as a long-term career anyway. I'd served in Afghanistan, I'd been on exercises around the world, but I was still hungry for adventure. So I left with a view to learning things like photography and writing, albeit quite informally—I was self-taught in those aspects.

But I got into what I'm doing now by setting up a small production company. I was taking journalists, directors, and photographers to what are perceived to be high-risk places. We were horse riding in the Pamir Mountains in Afghanistan; we took people skiing on the Iraq-Iran border; we took camels across the Sahara. It was lots of smaller adventures, and in doing so, I was doing photography and started writing for Lonely Planet and these sort of guidebooks, and the odd magazine here and there.

It was great fun, but I was determined—I always wanted to be an author, and I always wanted to write about a great journey. I've read a lot of books by explorers like Shackleton, David Livingstone, and Patrick Leigh Fermor...

Lady Carnarvon: Patrick Leigh Fermor, people like that, yeah.

Levinson Wood: ...Fermor, he was a great inspiration. And Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. I wanted to add a little bit to—humbly, you know—my own contribution to that world of travel writing. I decided I needed to pick the biggest thing that I could possibly think of doing, which, in an age of Google Earth and TripAdvisor, is quite difficult—to find something that hasn't really been done before. But I discovered that nobody had ever walked the length of the River Nile, and for good reason.

Walking the Nile

Lady Carnarvon: The Blue or the White Nile?

Levinson Wood: Well, the White Nile is the longer of the two tributaries, and it's still disputed quite where it originates. It's generally recognized that most of the water flows out of Lake Victoria. However, there are a few rivers that flow into Lake Victoria, so I thought if you're going to walk for 4,000 miles, you may as well do an extra couple of hundred to go to its furthest source, which is actually in the Nyungwe Forest on the Congo-Rwanda border.

So, in the autumn of 2013, that's where I started. It's literally a tiny little hole in a rock where the spring flows into a small stream, and then it gets bigger and bigger. So, nine months of walking, and I finally made it to the Mediterranean Sea.

Lady Carnarvon: How extraordinary, with a few adventures along the way, I imagine. Did you walk it, or you didn't raft it, or...?

Levinson Wood: No, no, all walking. Following the banks of the river the halfway and everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. It was tough, it was very challenging. We got caught up in the midst of civil war in South Sudan, we got robbed at gunpoint, I had spears thrown at me—the whole spectrum of what you can imagine.

What I wasn't prepared for, though, was—I was very lucky to get my first book deal, and a TV series was made about it as well. But as soon as I got back, the powers that be were like, "Right, what's next?" So I had to think of then more things that were equally challenging and bonkers to do.

Lady Carnarvon: Where did you go next? To the Himalayas?

Levinson Wood: The Himalayas was the next one. So I walked the length of the Himalayas from Afghanistan to Bhutan. That was another six-month walk. Then Central America from Mexico to Colombia, Russia to Iran, the Arabian Peninsula... So the next decade was filled with all sorts of very long walks.

Lady Carnarvon: Wow. Okay, so I don't need to ask if you keep fit, you clearly do.

Levinson Wood: Well, my legs are now filled with metal from various accidents along the way, so it's hard to keep up.

Lady Carnarvon: And how many people do you tend to walk or go with? How big is the party when you turn to set off?

Levinson Wood: It's very difficult to convince anyone to come the whole way for these sorts of things! So often, if there is a crew at all—on the Nile, for instance, it was nine months—we had a couple of crews that would pop along for maybe a week here and there. But there would be gaps of two, sometimes three months in between, where it would just be me with whichever local guide I could find along the way.

Lady Carnarvon: Goodness me. And did you have satellite phones for emergencies?

Levinson Wood: I mean, yes. In the early days, you'd have to rely on these GPS navigation devices. Nowadays, to be honest, you can find decent 5G signal in the middle of the Amazon or the Sahara. It's very—or now with Elon Musk's Starlink, you know, every taxi driver in the Amazon has one of those on their car.

Lady Carnarvon: My goodness. Yeah, I think I'm well behind on that. So when you came up with each new idea, was that discussed with the publishers? Did that come from you? How do you decide where you're going next?

Levinson Wood: I have to say, a lot of the ideas for the journeys really originated in my studies at university. I picked up a book about the Nile or about explorers in Central Asia, perhaps. So I've kind of craftily got away with doing, following my own passions and quite niche subject matters by kind of dressing them up in these grand adventures.

But often, it's been a curiosity. People like T.E. Lawrence, for instance—I've always been fascinated by the lives of some of these eccentric explorers, trying to follow in their footsteps. Wilfred Thesiger, Richard Burton, Paddy Leigh Fermor... So, you know, it's been a real joy in bringing some of those early studies into my current journeys and making a bit of a compare and contrast as to how life may or may not have changed in some of these areas, how the journeys might differ.

When I walked across the Empty Quarter desert in Saudi Arabia and Oman, when Wilfred Thesiger and Lawrence did these sorts of treks, it was very much the done thing to join a camel caravan for a couple of months. But you literally can't pay anyone for love nor money to get a camel in some of these places now! They look at you as though you're bonkers, and they say, "Well, just take a car and drive." So it was actually very challenging trying to recreate some of the journeys.

You mentioned very dangerous in those days, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, to undertake some of these journeys. But actually, the areas around the Horn of Africa, what's going on in Iran right now, makes it very challenging—not least because you've got to get access into the country in the first place. Trying to get a visa into Iran or Syria or Yemen is virtually impossible. So you have to find creative ways of getting into the countries in the first place.

Highclere’s Connection to History

Lady Carnarvon: They're incredibly dangerous. I don't know if you know, but T.E. Lawrence came and stayed here, did you know that?

Levinson Wood: So I heard, so I heard, yes.

Lady Carnarvon: So I was so excited when I came across his name in the visitors' book.

Levinson Wood: Amazing.

Lady Carnarvon: He was a great friend of a man called Aubrey Herbert, who was the younger brother of the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon. Aubrey was, again in his family tradition, a great adventurer and traveler, and spoke about seven different languages—including Albanian, Greek, and Turkish—and he traveled all around that part of the world.

The Fifth Earl I loved, because one summer in August 1909, he got into his Belgian Metallurgique car, and he drove from here to Constantinople. The roads were pretty iffy, petrol was from a chemist, he had a chauffeur with him and a car boot full of spares for the car. That was about it, and a very thick driving coat without much of a windscreen or, obviously, any seatbelts.

So that was very much in the vogue of his younger brother as well, Aubrey, who would again just suddenly shoot off to some far-flung country. He was twice offered the throne of Albania. He became great friends with many of the Albanians and traveled through those countries as well with many adventures. But he was much liked and got on with people and tried, and that seemed to go a long way, and was always campaigning for the underdog whenever he came back here. So it's very much in the spirit of this family to go out and explore, young man, if you like.

Levinson Wood: Fantastic. It is great.

Lady Carnarvon: I have often thought it would be rather fun to try to bring back somehow the world of those explorers and try to redo it, but it's lovely to see those names. I've obviously read about Amelia Edwards and Gertrude Bell in terms of my Egyptian writing.

But like you, I have written quite a bit about travel and the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon and all his travels through Egypt and obviously the Nile. But some of my books have also been about seasonality, seasons, gardens, landscape, and trees—and the trees here are wonderful.

Shifting Focus: From Travel to Trees

Lady Carnarvon: What turned you from travel to trees and woods?

Levinson Wood: It's a very good question. I've always admired nature and all of its glory, but having been on these sorts of long walks and adventures, I've spent a lot of time in these wonderful wilderness areas, whether that's the banks of the Nile, the Amazon rainforest, or the Congo.

I suppose I hadn't really thought too much about trees beyond their aesthetic beauty or perhaps a little bit of environmental concern. It was actually an experience I had in the Amazon back in 2021—so in the middle of COVID—where I was embedded with this tribe called the Ashaninka people, who live on the borderlands in one of the most remote parts of the Amazon. They live—an indigenous community—on the border with Peru and Brazil.

I met this shaman, who was a very inspiring man, and he was telling me how he's known as the Dalai Lama of the Amazon. He's actually met the Dalai Lama, he flies around the world advocating for indigenous rights. What's more, he's all about buying up this ranch land and replanting it with trees, and he's planted millions and millions of trees with his community.

Such an inspiring, quite small effort—millions of trees doesn't go a long way in the Amazon, but spreading this seed of hope, so to speak, he's encouraged lots of other communities to do a similar thing against a very difficult political situation where there's a lot of pressure to produce soy, cattle farming, and all the rest of it.

But it just occurred to me that trees are incredibly important, not just from an ecological standpoint, but in our art, in our literature. I open my book with a story about when I was 10 years old. My father, we went out collecting conkers for the old childhood game—I don't know if kids still do that anymore or not, probably not, but we planted one in a little pot. It grew over the years, and then he replanted it in the garden. This tree is now uprooting the front wall of the house in my parents' garden! It's, I don't know, 30 feet high.

What's that, sort of 34 years on? This tree has been this almost constant companion throughout my life. So whenever I go home, I just, you know, make a mental note, say hello to the tree. That's why I call the book The Great Tree Story, because we've all got our own great tree story. It might be the tragedy of the Sycamore Gap tree that got cut down. So many people went there to propose to their partner, to spread some ashes of a loved one. There are so many associations. Trees have provided not only the air that we breathe and the ecosystem that we inhabit, they were our first home. We evolved out of the tree. So trees, I just think, are so important.

The more I dug into the story of trees and that symbiotic relationship between people and humans, I just realized that trees are actually the universal avatar of nature. Everybody has a tree story.

The Legacy of Ancient Trees

Lady Carnarvon: Because I entirely read—I hadn't actually realized where they came from and their development out of the great white soup of the past, if you like, or whatever you want to call it. But I found that absolutely fascinating. Nor did I realize how old the Methuselah tree was, and I found that staggering.

Levinson Wood: It's phenomenal, isn't it? I mean, you've got cedars out here, I presume, haven't you? And the cedar trees in Lebanon, some of them date back 3,000, 4,000 years. They reckon that they used the wood from some of these trees to build the Temple of Solomon. The Methuselah tree, they reckon, is 5,000 years old. The fact that there were mammoths roaming the earth when this tree was a seedling is quite—

Lady Carnarvon: That I found amazing when I started thinking about it. My number six sister's husband's from Lebanon, and I'm very proud of the trees of Lebanon we have here, given so many of them have been cut down in Lebanon. We have a fantastic collection throughout the park, but they're only 300 years old or something like that. Cones came back with Bishop Pococke in the 18th century, as you would probably know. Bishop Pococke happened to be educated here at Highclere, so there was a great connection with his parents-in-law to Highclere. That's why we got quite so many cones which grew into seedlings which were then planted out. So some of them are fantastic.

One of my trees that I love—well, there's a very old Yew tree here which is probably about a thousand years old. And there's an old oak tree, I love the old stag oaks, the ones which are kind of possibly partly pollarded, which are kind of still alive though you don't think they are, but their girth is massive. I think those are possibly my favorite trees, which I would love to show you at some point. Otherwise, we're a beach of estates and limes.

We plant a whole raft of trees. I mean, I think, encouraged by what's going on at the moment, we have planted 22,000 trees in the last two years. But fruit trees, beach trees, lime trees, a whole blooming mixture, wondering what is going to survive.

Levinson Wood: It's hard to tell, isn't it? Do you have any redwoods here?

Lady Carnarvon: Yeah, yeah. We have redwoods, and I planted a new redwood actually, but it's next door to a Victorian sort of 1845 one. So I do look a little bit puny at the moment! But they're amazing trees. I think the Fourth Earl of Carnarvon, who was contemporaneous when the redwoods arrived with Veitch, came over here. Do you know about the story of the redwoods and how they were named?

Levinson Wood: No, I don't, actually.

Lady Carnarvon: James Veitch were quite a well-known botanical house, and they specialized in selling rare plants to aristocratic families. They'd heard about the redwoods on the West Coast of California, so they sent one of their people across to go and get some saplings, get some cones, and bring them back. Which he did; he found them, brought them back, brought some saplings back, went back.

They rushed down to Kew to call them Wellingtonia after the Duke of Wellington. Meanwhile, Dr. Kellogg—not related to the Kellogg's family—was also trying to create the genus in America, and he wanted to call them Washingtonia. But actually, Kew got there first, but there was quite an argument about Washingtonia or Wellingtonia for the redwood tree, which they ended up calling it Sequoia, which is their natural name for that reason. But anyway, so that's when they first came back here, and they were all planted out by Victorian aristocrats to have a little bit of the wonderful trees which you could drive a car through, apparently, which they'd all read about—or horse and carriage then.

Levinson Wood: Brilliant, and they're thriving here.

Lady Carnarvon: And they're thriving. The funny thing is, when the cedars of Lebanon thrive so well, it always puts them in danger because there's so little water where they grow in Lebanon that they grow thicker, thicker, thicker rather than up, due to the nature of the world around them. Here, they grow so successfully up that we end up having to try and thin some of the more iconic ones just to try to take the weight off the branches so that in the frost or the winds of this country and where they're planted, hopefully they don't crack too much. So, yes, they're amazing trees.

There's one very old one which I adore. I see how many hugs I can give it, because I think I worked out the number of the diameter divided by pi, whatever it was, gives you the number—I can't remember, there's a formula, isn't there, for working out the age? Which I remember, then I have to Google because I forget, and then I Google it and then I try to work it out. I'm sure there's an app for it now anyway. There probably should be an app, shouldn't there? And there probably is some sort of measuring tape rather than my kind of hugging a tree to see how old I think it is. But I guess it's a good game, and my dogs think I'm bonkers, but it's rather fun to do.

And the yews here are rather wonderful, and there's some very old box as well, which I find fascinating.

Future Projects & The Summer Ball Invitation

Lady Carnarvon: So the book we're discussing, The Great Tree Story by Levinson Wood, is about how forests have shaped our world. I think they've shaped our world, our words, our homes, our imagination, our thoughts so much, so it's a really lovely title. Much of the inside and beauty of this castle is due to trees—the woods, the library, the shelves, the carvings, and of course all the beams above our heads. We've restored a medieval barn which was last restored in 1438, so we're still splicing into that old oak, which is as hard as nails. That was probably a couple of hundred years old before it was installed in the barn, and that was probably grown here as well. So I just love that sort of sense of continuity it gives us, it's spectacular. One of my most favorite places because it's a cathedral, but a cathedral to the tree, actually.

Levinson Wood: Yeah, no, it's magical. That real sense of history and lineage, which encompasses all religions, all faiths, all cultures, it goes to show just the testimony of how important trees are. Have you ever been to Rosslyn Chapel, just outside of Edinburgh?

Lady Carnarvon: No, I've only read about it in The Da Vinci Code. Yes, exactly! I haven't been there.

Levinson Wood: But you go there, it's fantastic. They've got the great yew in the churchyard as well, but if you go inside, the entire church is decorated with these stone carvings of vines and leaves and the Green Man, which you see hidden—I think there's 50-odd Green Men hidden around the church.

Lady Carnarvon: Did you drive past the Green Man that I've carved into a cedar tree?

Levinson Wood: No, I haven't seen that. I must see it.

Lady Carnarvon: There's a fallen trunk—there was a cedar tree probably about as tall as this room, or the trunk that's left, and Geordie and I didn't want to cut it down because even the trunk is rather wonderful, though the rest of the tree had gone in a storm. And so I had this bright idea of asking a wood sculptor to carve a Green Man into it, because that links into the world around us, which I love. I'm a huge fan of Charles Dickens, so I thought he's got leaves coming down from the top, and we got a cherry picker in so the sculptor could carve the leaves all falling down. Around it, I've planted a rambling rector rose, because I thought I'll have God and the Druids all in one, plus the earth underneath and the roots there. He looks quite happy, actually. It's quite fun.

But thank you so much for coming today. I don't know whether—what is your next project, can you tell me about that?

Levinson Wood: Oh, I can give you a sneak preview. So we're hopefully going to turn this into a film.

Lady Carnarvon: Great. As in a feature documentary?

Levinson Wood: All about The Great Tree Story, with a global theatrical release. So, yeah, bringing it to the big screen.

Lady Carnarvon: My god, how exciting is that? Is that project just begun?

Levinson Wood: Yes, so we're doing—it's a long, slow process, but we've got some pretty big names attached as well, which I can't say. But, yeah.

Lady Carnarvon: That is fantastic. Well, no, then we can all look out for it then. How simply wonderful. I love the sketch on the front, going above and below. I'm sure you've read the book about the mitochondria and all the—that other wonderful book about how we're—all the roots connect.

Levinson Wood: Yes, I mean, there's some great books. Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, and the Peter Wohlleben books, The Hidden Life of Trees. I mean, there's so many great, quite niche books about the sort of, yeah, the mycorrhizal networks. What I've tried to do with this is approach it from a more of a historian and journalistic perspective.

Lady Carnarvon: Which I'd never read before and I really loved starting at the very beginning, the Genesis of it, and also because I love English, Paradise Lost, which I think we're trying not to lose our paradises, aren't we?

Levinson Wood: Indeed.

Lady Carnarvon: Thank you so much for coming today. Levinson, this summer we're having a Summer Ball. If you could bring anyone from any time or any place as your companion, partner to the ball, who would you bring?

Levinson Wood: Oh, good question. I would have loved to have met Sir Richard Burton, the explorer. He was known as the original hippie, he was an absolute carnage creator. I mean, he translated the Kama Sutra, he spoke 27 languages and tribal dialects. He was an absolute polymath, a fascinating man, got into lots of trouble, had a pet bear at Oxford, and I just think he would run riot at your ball.

Lady Carnarvon: He would really have some color to it! That would be fantastic, thank you so much. And Levinson, thank you so much for coming to Highclere today, I really appreciate it.

Levinson Wood: Thank you.