Heartwood

The Wisdom and Healing Kinship of Trees

Contributors

By Lindsay Branham, PhD

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Mar 10, 2026
Page Count
304 pages
Publisher
Balance
ISBN-13
9781538778562

Price

$18.99

Price

$24.99 CAD

Emmy‑nominated filmmaker and Cambridge University Psychology Ph.D. candidate Lindsay Branham invites readers into an emotional, reciprocal relationship with trees to heal our severed connections to ourselves and the earth.

How can we interbelong like trees? And how might this heal our bodies, and the wider earth body?

During her time as an investigative journalist, Lindsay Branham spent 15 years documenting acute human and environmental suffering around the world. After returning home with a diagnosis of secondary PTSD, and being plunged directly into the chaos of 2020 (pandemic, wildfires, etc.) an alarm sounded in her body, which caused her to slow, and listen. She sought refuge in the vastness of New Mexico, and the trees there began to speak to her body, forcing her to explore and research her connection to the earth asking, “how can we thrive together.”
 
Born out of Branham’s awakening through this experience, and the research that followed, Heartwood conjures an unexpected and necessary response to both the impacts of climate change and the current health crisis. Heartwood is an invitation to go on a journey with trees; from strangers to kin because, as Lindsay lays out in detail,everything belongs to each other, and trees in all their enduring, benevolent, alchemical generosity embody that connection. Combining scientific research from her studies as a PhD candidate at Cambridge investigative journalism, and spiritual philosophy, and presented as a constellation of story, ecology, prayer, and embodied practice, readers will be walked through a step‑by‑step process of creating an enduring and reciprocal relationship with the more than human world, while receiving a compelling case for this being a central antidote to climate collapse.
 
Introducing concepts such as eco‑grief, reciprocity as life force, the pace of place, ecoeroticism, attachment healing, spirals of belonging, composting suffering, wild pleasure, loving kinship, prophetic imagination, and fungi queendom, readers will be guided to:
  • Discover nature practices that are accessible to all, regardless of location.
  • Develop emotional and nervous system regulation in response to eco‑anxiety.
  • Be guided to generate, experience, and lean into pleasure and awe.
  • Deepen an ability to find ease, even during ongoing pain and complexity.
  • Develop tools to hold space and tend to grief.
  • Experience a profound sense of peace, relief, and genuine hope about the planet’s future.

Heartwood speaks directly to what is the missing piece at the heart of the unfolding environmental mega-crisis: the fact that human beings have been severed from our physical, emotional and spiritual connection to nature, and shares exactly how to come back into alignment.
 

Lindsay Branham, PhD

About the Author

Lindsay Branham is an Emmy-nominated film director, PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Cambridge, eco-doula and founder of NOVO, a social impact production company that inspirits human connection in imaginative ways. She is a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace and was named an Envision Social Good Fellow by the United Nations. She lives in Colorado. Lindsay has worked with organizations such as Kripalu, Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, Cambridge University and NIKE Women’s Innovation Program.

Learn more about this author