Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

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When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is – water – and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached at birth ourselves. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb.” With this book Roger Deakin can be counted one of the greatest of all nature writers. His beautiful book should serve to make us appreciate more keenly all that we have here on earth * Mail on Sunday * It was enough. I began the eerie, often mournful and sometimes funny process of working out what Roger had left behind. Digging through boxes. Brushing away mouse droppings and spiders' webs. Letters from friends, readers and lovers. A scribbled poem "To Pan". A folder titled "Drowning (Coroners)", which turned out not to be a record of coroners that he had drown- ed, but an account of his research into East Anglian deaths-by-water. Walnut Tree Farm features prominently in Roger’s writing, highlighting the essential role that the place had in his life. In 1969 he bought the moated Suffolk farmhouse, along with 12 acres of meadows, from a local farmer who had been keeping pigs in the semi-derelict house. Roger stripped the Elizabethan-era structure down to the original skeleton of oak, ash and chestnut timbers — 323 in all, and he estimated that 300 trees would have been felled to build it. Gradually Roger rebuilt Walnut Tree, sleeping in a bivouac with his cats inside the huge central fireplace until he created himself a bedroom.

Wildwood Quotes by Roger Deakin - Goodreads Wildwood Quotes by Roger Deakin - Goodreads

This isn't, of course, where Roger's archive ends: with the final file on the shelf (RD/WTF/15 Aga cooker: 1998–99). The dimensions of his legacy exceed these 23 linear metres. A life lived as variously as his, with the gift for inspiration that his writing possesses, means that his influence ripples unpredictably outwards. Green Man-like, Roger keeps cropping up in unexpected places, speaking in leaves. Letters arrive from around the world: readers who have encountered his work, and been powerfully changed by it. There is a BBC4 film of Waterlog under development, with Simon Beaufoy writing the script. A theatrical adaptation of the same book by Andrew Burton is due to open in Ipswich on 1 June. A geographer recalls the long hot summer of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster — and the high price New Orleans is paying for America’s appetite for oil. When you enter the water, something, like a metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking glass surface and enter a new world in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim.” Almost 1000 species use ash including wood mice, liverworts, wrens, blue tits, bats, lichens, fungi and beetles. Bullfinches will eat ash keys in winter when food is scarce. The caterpillars of many kinds of moth feed on ash leaves. Read more An excellent read - lyrical and literate and full of social and historical insights of all kinds' Colin Tudge, Financial Times

I remember entering the steep-eaved barn into whose topmost room the archive had slowly been gathered. Up two ladders, through a trapdoor, and into the narrow attic. Dusty slant light from a gable window. And boxes: 60 or 70 of them, all but filling the space. A life condensed to a room. I felt overwhelmed, partly by sadness and partly by hopelessness. How could this volume of documents ever be brought under control? From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, Roger Deakin embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with wood and with trees. All of us , I believe , carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there :places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem'We are seven' ,our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened.By way of returning the compliment , we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far from them.” In summer trees are in full leaf. Leaves are made up of small leaflets on either side of a long stem. There are 9 – 13 leaflets in pairs with one at the end. The leaflets are pointed and toothed, with hairs on the lower surface. Female trees will have large bunches of ash keys (seeds) that hang from the branches in clumps. In autumn ash trees are amongst the first trees to lose their leaves. The leaves often fall while still green, but they may yellow slightly before falling. Ash keys fall from the tree in winter and early spring, and are dispersed by birds and mammals.

Ash trees - Fraxinus excelsior - Ash tree identification Ash trees - Fraxinus excelsior - Ash tree identification

It was at Walnut Tree Farm that Roger Deakin dedicated almost four decades to the practice of bioregionalism, developing an intimate knowledge of his local landscape and the natural world around him. Here he swam in the moat, slept in the old shepherd’s hut, crawled in the hedge and worked the land: sawing, chopping, raking, hoeing, mowing, scything, planting, harvesting and building. Roger did this because, as he wrote in a notebook: “People ask how a writer connects with the land. The answer is through work.” The real wages of potters are in the daily silent appreciations of each of their customers as they pour the morning tea from their teapot, or drink coffee from their mug, or eat dinner off their plate. To be this involved in the daily lives of people who appreciate and admire your work enough to buy it must bring deep reassurance. It is a kind of immortality you can enjoy while still living. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Deakin likened the tendrils of the tumour that killed him to tree roots penetrating his brain and lived just long enough to be delighted by the concept of the wood wide web, a fitting mycelial metaphor for his relentless urge to make connections of his own. That mission has outlasted him, and this extraordinary insight into his life will lend new complexity and reach to the network. Wildwood is about the element wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and our lives.

When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is – water – and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached at birth ourselves. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born.”