Nick Hayes lives on a barge on the Thames in South Oxfordshire, which tells you something useful: this is a writer who has made his politics physical. The Medicine Tree grows out of that berth — out of Hayes's discovery that the neighbouring Hardwick estate, whose Rose family once inspired Kenneth Grahame's Mr Toad, is in the process of disinheriting itself. The heirs, having traced their wealth to colonial extraction in North America, are turning the estate into England's first community-owned charitable property, run by the roughly 90 tenants and alternative community that has accumulated in its shelter. Hayes, serving as artist-in-residence, watched it happen and built a book around it. The book's spine is a simple and serious question: why do English people lack what Indigenous societies across the world take for granted — a living, mythopoetic relationship with their terrain? Hayes's answer is a slow-motion dispossession, "a very steady letting of England's veins" over two thousand years. Christianity displaced animism. Enclosure displaced common land. The agricultural and industrial revolutions displaced the people who worked it. By the time most of us arrive in the landscape, we feel like tourists. Hayes wants to explain how that happened and sketch what repairing it might look like — not through nationalism or nostalgia, not through the kind of invented folklore Robert Graves gave us in The White Goddess, but through something that might grow organically if people are simply given time, rights, and responsibilities on the land. The book's emblematic object is a single tree beside the Thames path — a hybrid of a native black poplar and an eastern cottonwood imported from North America by French colonists. It is a mongrel, like England itself, and it carries weight from two traditions: in both Indigenous North American and old European culture, the poplar stood for community. Hayes is good at this kind of symbolic triangulation. He is less interested in argument as a formal structure than in resonance — the point where a tree, a river, a folk song, and a colonial land record vibrate at the same frequency. The Hardwick community is presented as a working proof-of-concept, though Hayes is canny enough to mythologise it rather than over-document it. Its members appear under occupational names — the Dyer, the Head Grower, the Heiress — which signals his intent: this is a folk tale, a usable story, not a policy white paper. That choice has costs. Readers wanting to interrogate the mechanics of the charitable transition, or to test its replicability, will find the book evasive. But Hayes seems aware that a detailed governance document would kill the thing he is trying to cultivate. He is after the imaginative permission to want something different, not the planning application. The book sits alongside Hayes's previous work and his co-founding, with Guy Shrubsole, of the Right to Roam campaign — which since 2020 has held more than 15 peaceful mass trespasses and fought court battles with major landowners, including a hedge fund manager's attempt to restrict wild camping rights on Dartmoor. His earlier book, The Book of Trespass, made the legal and emotional case for access to the 92% of England and Wales currently excluded from public access. The Medicine Tree is less confrontational — more mythopoetic, more elegiac — but it shares the same premise: that England's land settlement is not natural, not inevitable, and not acceptable. A privately owned toll bridge near Pangbourne, where Hayes watched a boy do a back-flip into the Thames, charges 60p a crossing and belongs to a company whose family ancestry traces to one of William the Conqueror's barons. Hayes estimates it earns the company more than £1 million a year for providing nothing except permission to cross. It is a perfect emblem for the book's argument: a piece of infrastructure that exists solely to extract rent from a public that long ago stopped noticing it was a choice. The Thames itself has sewage discharged into it by privatised water companies. These are not digressions — they are the point. The book's real subject is what it costs everyone when a culture accepts dispossession as normal. The book ends with Hayes's community gathering on the riverbank after dark, guitars and accordions and a saxophone appearing from the surrounding houses. It is an earned image rather than a sentimental one, because Hayes has spent 300-odd pages explaining why this specific kind of gathering, in this specific place, with these specific people, is harder than it looks and rarer than it should be. Whether it constitutes a model for England's 56 million other people is a question The Medicine Tree wisely declines to answer directly. Hayes's bet is that if you tell the story well enough, people will start asking the question themselves.
