Bosky. Covered in bushes or underwood; full of thickets. Love it! Makes me want to head down to the river valley and visit some thickets now!

Bosky Dogwood

Maybe the earliest appearance in a book is Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “My many boskie acres, and my unshrubd downe. IV, I, 81 Ah, how I long for some boskie acres of my own!

My old favourite, Sir Walter Scott, in Lady of the Lake (which I haven’t read – but obsessively revisited Ivanhoe! Which has lots of great nature writing in it, come to think of it) says “The bosky thickets.”

This great word came into my world through Ross King’s, Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, where he tells us the Group of Seven’s Toronto studio was designed by Arts and Crafts style architect, Eden Smith, whose works “adorned the city’s boskier neighbourhood,” including his home neighbourhood, the artsy Wychwood Park (What a terrific name! As of right now, the new unofficial nickname of my own neighbourhood!) Speaking of the Group of Seven – there were some hard-core nature-fix collectors!

• Thanks to the online Oxford English Dictionary for the definition and most of the quotations.
• Ross King, Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven (2010)
• The Wychwood Park bit about Matthews came from good ol’ Wikipedia