The Green Trees Beyond: A Memoir

Francis R. Cook, formerly curator of the Canadian Museum of Nature’s
Herpetology Section, is currently researcher emeritus.

The colors of the Royal Tank Regiment with whom R.D. Lawrence served in
World War II were brown, red, and green, symbolizing the stirring
regimental motto “Through Mud and Blood to the Green Fields Beyond.”
Those fields are the “green trees” of Lawrence’s title. This frank
and reflective account traces an uneasy and sometimes hazardous life, as
frequently lucky as tragic, anchored by the natural world, from the
pine-covered mountain slopes of Lawrence’s childhood in the province
of Catalonia in Spain, to the northern forests of Canada.

Lawrence was born in 1921 of British and Spanish parents. After an
idyllic childhood in which he acquired a deep, free-ranging thirst for
the natural world, the accident of place and time delivered him, in
succession, into the bloody conflagrations of the Spanish Civil War and
World War II. He then entered university to take up the study of
biology. When the elitism and formality of academia soured his drive to
complete a graduate degree, he turned to journalism and the more
unconstrained spaces of Canada. He is the author of 24 books, primarily
on natural history. Those who have enjoyed Lawrence’s direct prose and
unapologetic empathy for wild creatures will find this memoir at once
moving and entertaining.