With the Grain

When the sun and the wind play together just right, the hill of young cedar and Douglas fir behind my house looks alive with green fire. It’s almost impossible to imagine this place without trees, yet even my small island in British Columbia’s Salish Sea was extensively logged in the first half of the twentieth century. While a few 250- and even 400-year-olds still grow here, much of what Mayne Islanders like me admire today is relatively new growth. And we admire it from wood-framed homes filled with wood floors, dining tables, picture frames, kitchen spoons, and axe handles, with piles of logs outside.

Unstoppably creative and increasingly conservation-oriented, humans want the forest, but we also want the trees. That both-ways position is at the heart of Marq de Villiers’s The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin, where he sets out “to explore the long and entangled...