Today, he begins his search for the perfect tree in woodland near his South Wales home. It's a bitter, Elizabethan winter and snow lies on the forests. After a long hunt, he gets a call from a forester in Herefordshire. There is something special about the stuff – using it, holding it, smelling it, walking around it – that connects us to our history and with which we risk losing touch. From his tree Penn has made a lovely book: part elegant history, part anxious lament. He discusses drying methods a little bit under each use with some general rules. It really is an important step that is surrounded by a lot of folklore & science where I'm not always sure which is correct. He takes the experts at their word, a good idea, IMO. While he discusses the need to air dry wood about a year per inch, he mentions a bit about kiln drying, although I would have liked to have heard more detail on the local methods since I know it varies by area & species.

Rob Penn felled a single ash tree and set out to make as many things as possible from the wood. He travelled widely to visit master crafters who took parts of his tree and made it into over 40 items including: a desk, kitchen worktops, spoons, a tobbogan and axe handles. To learn more, Penn decided to fell one and follow it as it was made into as many different things as possible. “I could get a writer’s desk and a table made,” he writes. “I would turn some of the less valuable timber into panelling for my office and worktops for my kitchen.” There would be plenty more besides, more than 40 different items in total, all from a single tree. Penn takes us through the various uses, with accompanying passages of history and science, sprinkled with trivia. A veteran writer and broadcaster, he has written several books on cycling and one on the weather, and has a keen eye for the interesting tangent. I hadn’t known, for instance, that the first Routemaster buses had ash frames. No one obsesses like the English. In this book, Penn gets it in his head to find a perfect Ash tree, cut it down, and have as many things possible crafted from it. You get to follow him through the woods of Wales where he resides, looking at stands of Ash trees, none quite right, until he finds his perfect 100 year old tree. A eulogy to the importance of ash throughout human history . . . Fascinating’ – Tobias Jones, Guardian This is a tale about the joy of making things in wood, of its touch and smell, its many uses and the resonant, calming effect of running our hands along a wooden surface. It is a celebration of man's close relationship with this greatest of natural materials and a reminder of the value of things made by hand and made to last.Robert Penn cut down an ash tree to see how many things could be made from it. After all, ash is the tree we have made the greatest and most varied use of over the course of human history. Journeying from Wales across Europe and Ireland to the USA, Robert finds that the ancient skills and knowledge of the properties of ash, developed over millennia making wheels and arrows, furniture and baseball bats, are far from dead. The book chronicles how the urge to understand and appreciate trees still runs through us all like grain through wood.

Beautifully crafted, [ The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees ranges] freely over intellectual territory - masculinity, nostalgia, identity . . . Fascinating . . . Never have the benefits of getting your chopper out appeared more obvious (Robert Crampton, Books of the Year The Times)An] extended tribute to the beauty and usefulness of the ash tree... A homage to vanishing skills that were once integral to the functioning of rural Britain (Tom Fort Literary Review)