It’s always deep in the heart of the forest where the evil lurks. Hansel and Gretel come across the evil witch and her gingerbread house, Little Red Ridding Hood meets the wolf, and countless other fell and dangerous creatures are known to lurk there. Our relationship to trees and forests has a history of being adversarial; in order to establish outposts of civilization, homesteaders would clear away trees to grow the meager crops that keep them alive.

As hard as it for us to imagine, most of the world’s temperate climate land masses, North America, Europe, and parts of Asia were at one time covered with mixed growth forests. Evergreens and deciduous trees stood cheek to jowl and were home to wildlife that has long since vanished. While North America – Canada in particular – is still home to swaths of pristine forest land, Europe’s great stands have been greatly reduced. Where wolves and woodland bison once roamed, small pockets of trees remain that are but ghosts of their past glory.

The majority of us will probably go our entire lives without setting foot in anything resembling a forest, or at best visit one of the domesticated versions where neat roadways and paths lead you through ordered rows of new growth and the occasional old “veteran” tree bearing the scars of the axe that failed to fell him. Yet for those of us willing to make the effort to strike off on our own and enter into the forest world, the experience can be close to mystical. The noise of civilization has ebbed into silence, and we stand there alone with only floating pieces of light and dust, occasional bird song, and small animal life for company.

The first book of Viggo Mortensen’s poems and photographs that I acquired, Coincidence of Memory, had on its cover an image of trees rendered in slightly out of focus shades of grey. Since then I have had the good fortune to be able to view the majority of his books, and in each of them there has been at least one image that has paid homage to the splendour and mystery of trees. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that Skovbo (a Danish word that roughly translates into English as “home in the forest”), his latest book of photographs and poems published by Perceval Press, gathers together images of trees that he has photographed from around the world. Meant to be a companion for an upcoming exhibit of Mr. Mortensen’s photography at the Reykjavik Museum of Photography, Skovbo works just as well as a stand alone collection of work replete with the mystery and beauty of trees.

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