Imagine you are an alien from another world, suddenly arriving on Spaceship Earth. You land in the middle of a forest. What do you see? What do you smell and hear? There is no past experience, no familiar taxonomy by which to ground an understanding of what’s all around. You can’t interpret it; all you can do is be there. Looking closer, you begin to notice: the root systems of the trees; the insects gravitating toward flowers of all colors and sizes; the liverworts in the branches and the mosses on the ground. There is life all around you, and it all seems connected. This place is a living civilization.

Few among us could hope to experience a moment of such pure discovery. We are, after all, that peculiar species for which everything must have its place in a system of meaning. What would it be like to step out into a forest and look around without epistemology? Instead of looking for what it all means, we might just see, a little more clearly, the world for what it is. 

The Living Forest: A Visual Journey Into the Heart of the Woods (Timber Press, October 2017) is a testament to just this kind of looking and seeing. From soaring heights up above the tree canopy down to the finest filigree of a root stem, and all the connective tissue in between, biologist Joan Maloof and photographer Robert Llewellyn take us on an adventure into the biosphere we call home. With precise, stunning photographs and a distinctly literary narrative that tells the story of the forest ecosystem along the way, The Living Forest is an invitation to join in the eloquence of seeing. 

“They all have a plan,” Robert Llewellyn said in an interview from his home in Virginia when asked what struck him the most about making the book. “All the trees have a plan; all the plants have a plan. I’ll give you one example: the blackberry lily of the forest. It gets pollinated and it drops the flowers. It forms a seedpod that looks exactly like a blackberry, and guess what? Bears like blackberries. So the plan is to distribute their offspring through the hungry bears that come along. There are hundreds of stories like that, and they are all different plans.” 

Llewellyn, whose work has been featured in 35 books and who has been photographing plants for over a decade, has a special vantage when it comes to trees. He lives in central Virginia, in Albemarle County bordering Shenandoah National Park. “You don’t have to hike very far to see more there than you’ll ever see,” Llewellyn says. “Just hike for 100 feet and turn over a log. You’ll find a fully functional part of the tree right there under the log. There’s a civilization out there that we’re living with. It has an intelligence that isn’t like ours. They don’t use iPhones or flat screens. But they are very much alive, and very much aware of other trees around them.” 

Llewellyn first got behind a camera while in high school in southern Virginia, where he grew up. During his senior year, he became editor of the school’s yearbook and was tasked with documenting student life. He spent the year walking around campus with an old Nikon slung around his neck. “I was amazed at how the camera changes you,” he says. “I was sort of invisible before, and then suddenly with a camera, it’s a whole different interaction. The wonderful thing about photography is that everything shows up as new. You see things that make you say, ‘Wow.’ I say that a lot.”

Llewellyn did a lot of commercial work and advertising assignments early in his career. He went on to contribute photographs to books on everything from cathedrals to cityscapes and landscapes. Then in 2004, he met Richmond Times-Dispatch garden columnist Nancy Ross Hugo, who at the time was looking to write a book about Virginia trees. They went on to produce three titles together: Remarkable Trees of Virginia, Trees Up Close, and Seeing Trees. 

Their inaugural project, to identify and document the 100 most remarkable trees in Virginia, was a turning point for Llewellyn in how he viewed forest ecosystems. “I had always thought trees were an element of the landscape, a shape, a color,” he says. “Nancy began to explain each aspect of the trees to me and a lightbulb went off. They’re alive. They’re born and they die, and it’s all very well planned.”

Now he’s teamed up with Joan Maloof, professor of biology and environmental studies at Salisbury University, to document the forest as a whole and its diverse, interconnected ecosystem. The results are spectacular. The Living Forest has some 300 photographs and a beautifully written narrative that tells the story of everything from trees and leaves to root systems and fungi, to the teeming societies of insects, animals, and other wildlife that also make this extraordinary place their home.

Anyone who has tried to capture the complete breadth and scope of a forest with a single image knows the challenge: The pictures can often look too tight and claustrophobic, and the lack of color contrast and poor lighting are limiting factors in conveying the essence of the place. To capture wide landscapes, Llewellyn took panoramic shots using a 14mm lens and then stitched them together into a single image, as with a four-page spread featuring American beech trees. The beech is one of the few deciduous trees that doesn’t lose its leaves. Instead, the leaves turn white and stay on the tree until spring, looking like tufts of fur, which these photographs capture with amazing depth and detail. 

Other images in the book play with fog and light. The branches stretching from the canopies explode with energy and life, as with the book’s final spread—a dreamy centerfold of buttery boughs and rays. The photograph came about during a trip Llewellyn took to Massachusetts, where he was staying with a fellow photographer who only shoots in first light and last light.

During other trips into the woods, the wildlife came to Llewellyn. While poking around an oak tree near his studio, a spring peeper frog, with its distinctive X marking on the back, jumped off a branch onto his shirt and just hung out. Llewellyn managed to encourage the frog onto a tree branch with a budding acorn and photographed it close up, its bulbous toes askew on a leaf bed as a matrix of green veins and stems hover just overhead.

What about the parts of the wild that don’t burst through the branches or jump out onto your shirt? Maloof was constantly making the project a treasure hunt, regularly guiding Llewellyn toward forest microsystems that few people take the time to notice. Llewellyn says, “We’d go out into the forest and she would say to me, ‘Turn over that log. What do you see?’ I would say, ‘What will I see?’ She would never tell me. It was all about discovery.” 

One of the best examples is the series on bark beetle markings. Beetles dig trenches in the bark as they’re laying eggs. When the eggs hatch, the beetles burrow their way out. Llewellyn photographed a single piece of bark no longer than an inch to capture those tiny trench lines. He came in on it at an angle so that the edge of the bark looked like the top of a mountain, and took the picture using the focus stacking technique. He shot a series of about 30 images of the bark from back to front and from all different points of focus, then used software to stitch them together. Here, the surface of the bark looks like an alien landscape. At the bottom are little black circles where the newborn beetles emerge from their subterranean cradle into the light.

At one point Maloof told him to go find a piece of root and photograph it. Any root, she told him. So Llewellyn picked a half-inch piece of root from a houseplant and washed it off. All of its tiny hairs for taking up water and nutrients come alive on the page, in addition to a curious little yellow knob at the end, which Maloof explained later on. “She said that the root is not a passive structure lying in the earth. Through that knob it’s moving, seeking, reacting to the world. There’s an intelligence there.” 

Llewellyn used a Canon 5DS R for most of the shots and a Canon 5D Mark IV high-speed camera to photograph wildlife. He employs about 15 different lenses, everything from a 2,000mm to a 50x microscope lens.

Browsing through the book, one gets the sense that each image and anecdote is the snapshot of a moment of pure discovery. What consistently shows up in those moments, whether through Llewellyn’s lens or Maloof’s eloquent writing, is an all-too-obvious truth: Within this biosphere, all around us is an intelligence we don’t fully understand, that is alive to the world and in a relationship to that world. And to us. 

Llewellyn hopes people look at the landscapes in the book, and the paths stretching through them and into the distance, and then get up, go outside, and walk a path of their own. 

“We’re very complacent with our planet,” he says. “I wish people didn’t look at flat screens and iPhones so much, and instead saw the world in real time and without labeling. Labeling things gets in the way of seeing. What would happen if you could look at things without labels? You would look at them, and you’d be amazed.”