The Medicine Tree: Nick Hayes on repairing our rotten roots

We're so excited to be bringing you award-winning writer, illustrator and land justice campaigner Nick Hayes for the Edinburgh launch of The Medicine Tree!

Nick will be in conversation with Nadia Shaikh, a land justice campaigner and co-director of the Right to Roam campaign.

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.

Our author

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.

Our chair

A naturalist and conservationist, Nadia Shaikh has devoted her life to repairing our relationship with nature.

She joined Right to Roam in 2021 after 14 years in the nature conservation sector, convinced that mainstream 'nature protection' wasn't involving people in a meaningful way and that the connections between enclosure, land ownership and our devastating biodiversity loss were too big to ignore.

She now lives in Scotland where she enjoys roaming free, rock pooling and kayaking.