'I was orphaned at the age of 11 . . ." It could be the opening sentence of a Cormac McCarthy novel – except for the smiling grey-haired woman sitting opposite me at a booth in the Fitzwilliam Hotel on St Stephen's Green, of all places. Her book The Global Forest,a collection of 40 poetic, pointed essays on trees, has already bowled me over. Now she is proceeding to do the same thing, in person. In spades.
I had expected – what? I’m not sure. But not this. A bundle of energy; a fountain of information; an unmistakably Irish voice which contains not a trace of all the years Diana Beresford-Kroeger has spent living and working in Canada. A seanchaí dressed in a whirlwind. She may even be the new John Moriarty, except female, and scientifically qualified. Dazed, I try to keep up. She is, she’s telling me, related on her mother’s side to the O’Donoghue’s of the Castle of Ross; on her father’s, to Lord and Lady Tyrone and also Lord Beresford, John Hubert Beresford, of Waterford. “Okay? So I’m an aristocratic mongrel,” she declares, with obvious satisfaction at the impudence.
After her parents died, the 11-year-old Diana Beresford was taken to the Caha Mountains by her mother’s relatives and instructed in Brehon law, meditation, cures – “all the forms of sacred thinking of old Ireland” – for two years. There followed degrees and qualifications galore. Science at UCC. Molecular biology and botany. She now lives with her photographer husband on a sprawling property outside Ottawa, where she propagates rare trees and medicinal plants. “I live very simply, very sustainably,” she says. “I have a huge garden. I eat out of the garden. I live like a monk. I write every day.” But she sometimes comes out of her burrow, she says. And hangs out with some truly astonishing people. When she talks about “Professor Wilson”, I have to stop her. Is this EO Wilson we’re talking about? The world-famous biologist? “Of course,” she says. “”He does the peer-review of all my books. He’s really my patron, if you think of it that way.” Another collaborator is a millionaire Irishwoman who lives just outside Fort Worth in Texas, with whom Beresford-Kroeger has just joined forces to find a tree-based cancer cure. Yet another millionaire, Leslie Lee, has provided the funding for The Ancient Tree Archive, which aims to decipher the genomes of some of the world’s oldest trees, then replant some of our most ancient forests.
“She’s a friend of Bill Gates, so she’s trying to persuade him to come on board,” Beresford-Kroeger adds. How does she meet these folks? Well, when you’ve been named as one of the 20 most influential people in Canada and are a winner of the Wings WorldQuest award for Discovery and Science, as well as “the darling of Harvard”, you apparently get some intriguing dinner invitations. “About three years ago,” Beresford-Kroeger confides, “I got a call inviting me to dinner. She said, ‘I’ll send my jet for you’. I said to my husband, ‘There’s a crazy woman on the phone’. An hour went by. Then I got another call and this deep voice said, ‘I’m Alan. I’m the pilot. Can you meet me at Ottawa airport?’ So I put on an evening dress and a knickers and went to dinner at her house in Michigan. An extraordinary place – a Frank Lloyd Wright house built of glass and steel to last for 1,000 years, shimmering out over a lake . . .”
Beresford-Kroeger has spent much of her life studying the differences between the North American forest and the plants and trees with which she fell in love as a five-year-old wandering the fields in Ireland. “All the species are different – parallel, but different,” she says. But the drift of what’s happening is everywhere the same. Trees are being cut down. Forests are disappearing. And that’s bad, bad news for people.
In The Global Forest– published by Particular Books – Beresford-Kreoger explains why. Trees provide food, medicine, clean air. We're only just beginning to understand how they work. We still don't fully understand photosynthesis, let alone carbon sequestering. There's a paragraph in the book which begins: "There is a new violence in the world. This violence stands apart from all the other familiar forms. This one is silent and it shows no mercy to the young and the old. It is in the air we breathe."
This is particulate pollution – whose lethal reality, like the increasing acidity of the world’s oceans, or the Great Pacific Garbage Dump, or the wholesale disappearance of frogs and bees, is the horror film our children and grandchildren won’t just have to watch. They’ll have to live it.
What can we do? “Small things,” insists Beresford-Kroeger. “And, look. Here’s one thing. I’m an adviser for the Woodland League of Ireland. They’ve got a petition against the sale of Irish forests going at woodlandleague.org, and I want everybody in Ireland to press their finger on that and put their name on it.
Selling off the forests is crazy – in Ireland, or anywhere else. I want that list up to a million signatures. Send a strong message to the politicians. You can push us so far, but you’re not taking the life out of the country.”
How extraordinary, that an Irish woman has achieved all this, on the other side of the Atlantic, and we’ve never even heard of her. We should be shouting her name from the rooftops.