Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

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Apart from a sturdy Rayburn, and some rudimentary, and far from "mod" cons, Walnut Tree Farm was almost as Elizabethan the day he died there as when he first moved in: brick floors, wide open fireplaces, rough furniture, rugs, vines, creepers and, on wet days, mud. But the first-person narration is liberally interspersed with the impressions, memories and perspectives of dozens of interviewees – friends, relatives, colleagues and associates, pupils from a short but memorable stint as a teacher of English, and lovers, of whom there were many. At the head of the table, Isa carves the head, deftly dissecting and sharing out the various symbolic organs.

East to Eden – Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane East to Eden – Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane

At the same time this evolutionary pressure changed it from a ‘bird’ fruit with edible seeds to a ‘mammal’ fruit with poisonous seeds. Literary archives can have a troublesome aura of fetish to them: laundry lists become holy writ, pens and pencils a saint's finger bones. My last e-mail from Roger came on Easter Sunday 2006, still waiting for spring, and just finishing Wildwood.

Deakin only published a single book in his lifetime: Waterlog was hugely successful and one of the foundational texts for the whole wild swimming movement.

Wildwood: A Journey through Trees by Roger Deakin | Goodreads

Of course, some of it really was dangerous, but it was Deakin's view that perhaps "danger" was something we should get more used to rather than be so routinely protected from. When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is – water – and it begins to move with the water around it. I experience the same feeling when I look around the faces of my new friends: the first thing I see in them is their beauty, and I rejoice in the diversity of human genes that made them, as the flower genes seeking each other in the pollen made the honey. Unlike their English counterparts in the same Crataegus family, they are sweet, but you still have to spit out the hard pips. 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.

A life lived as variously as his, with the gift for inspiration that his writing possesses, means that his influence ripples unpredictably outwards. The trees are all thirty to fifty feet tall, spreading and unpruned, except here and there by animals, still bearing plenty of fruit in a good year.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin | Goodreads

I felt very much at home; even more so when the hotelier brought in a breakfast tray of fresh, hot bread, honey, butter and chai. A favoured apple tree could be reliably propagated only by cutting scions from it and grafting them. After lunch, Barrie Juniper and I sat down in the fellows’ common room over coffee and the Times Atlas, which we opened at Central Asia.Alison asked about my photographs from rural East Anglia and showed me an exhibition invitation I had sent to Roger, which had been lying on his desk. Perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Colin Tudge, Roger Deakin's unmatched exploration of our relationship with trees is autobiography, history, traveller's tale and incisive work in natural history.

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

Many of the old varieties that haven’t died out altogether have become rarities, so Juniper realized that mapping out their genetic identities through DNA samples was a matter of urgency. It took me years to find it, but tucked away in a paragraph of “East to Eden” was a sentence that would grow through my own life in ways which are still surprising me now, more than a dozen years on. There had been heavy rain overnight, and as I lay in bed I could hear the first traffic splashing through deep puddles in the potholed streets.Gradually Roger rebuilt Walnut Tree, sleeping in a bivouac with his cats inside the huge central fireplace until he created himself a bedroom. On Republic Square, outside the old House of Government building, stands a row of Central Asian elms, shaped into perfect domes like a row of soldiers in dark-green busbies.