Despite—or perhaps because of—this easy kinship, there are moments when the ur-apple feels keenly and simply to me like my friend; like Roger. A few times each year I find myself un-self-consciously talking to it as if I am talking to Roger: asking advice, wondering something aloud, telling him a story. And a few times each year, more mysteriously, the tree causes both memories and new thoughts to grow without warning in my mind, like an apple suddenly fruiting from bud to ripeness in an impossible second. I recently read Seamus Heaney’s translation of Rilke’s poem “The Apple Orchard” and found that its opening line described an “inner” fructification I recognised instantly: The journey starts at home, as many great journeys do, slowly circling outwards and then away, out accross the wide world, before returning to the familiarity of his beloved Walnut Tree Farm. 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.

Roger Deakin Quotes (Author of Waterlog) - Goodreads Roger Deakin Quotes (Author of Waterlog) - Goodreads

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. It will take you into the heart of the woods, where we go 'to grow, learn and change. I’m sad to leave the solitary Valery, whom I instinctively like. When we shake hands, it is the two-handed lingering double-clasp kind with a deep look into the eye. The look says, ‘We come from vast distances apart on this earth, yet I feel a natural, spontaneous respect for you. It is very moving, that we far-flung people from different tribes are clearly first natural friends, not enemies at all.’ I very nearly catch myself making the little speech, but restrain myself in time. Luisa and I buy a litre jar of Valery’s best wild apple-blossom honey to share. When Valery hands it over, it feels like a blessing—the palpable proof of the goodness and beauty of the place, and the wild apples. 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. 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.

How to identify an Ash Tree

I don't know what I was expecting from this book. Maybe an insight into the mythological impact of woods and how they have shaped our culture and our way of life.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees eBook : Deakin, Roger

From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, he 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 trees. As the world's forest are whittled away, Deakin's sparkling prose evokes woodlands anarchic with life, rendering each tree as an individual, living being. At once a traveler's tale and a splendid work of natural history, Wildwood reveals, amid the world's marvelous diversity, that which is universal in human experience."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.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin | Goodreads

Na Parte Dois um dos capítulos é dedicado ao escultor inglês David Nash (n. 1945), um artista que trabalha a madeira e que faz esculturas com árvores “vivas”. An excellent read - lyrical and literate and full of social and historical insights of all kinds' Colin Tudge, Financial TimesIn 1968 he bought an Elizabethan moated farmhouse on the edge of Mellis Common, near Diss where he lived until his death from a brain tumour, first diagnosed only four months before his death.

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

I was moved and fascinated by Hamburger’s doubled notion of fruit “outlast[ing] our days,” and of “difference fill[ing] out the trees.” Reading his elegy, it became clear to me that I should give away the pips I had harvested from Roger’s ur-apple. So I parceled up four or five pips at a time in damp cotton-wool, sealed the cotton-wool in small bags, and then posted or gave the bags to ten or so people—to Roger’s editor at the time of his death, who had published Wildwood; to friends who I knew still missed him; to certain readers who I knew had never met him but for whom his writing had become indispensable; and to his two translators, Andreas and Frank, who had grafted Wildwood into German. Mellis was Roger Deakin's ecological base from which he made forays: to other parts of East Anglia (he taught in Diss for three years), to the Lake District, the West Country and to Jura for Waterlog and to Kyrgistan to find the original apple trees and Tasmania to see the world's oldest untouched forests for Wildwood: a journey through trees, his book about the human love of wood. It was all undertaken on a shoestring: camping, hostelling, sleeping in bus shelters. He was a true free spirit, anchored to the home dirt he loved on Mellis Common, but open and eager to see what was happening on the other side of the world.A favoured apple tree could be reliably propagated only by cutting scions from it and grafting them. Scions could be preserved and carried by driving the ends of the stems into a hard fruit such as a quince. Thus, the favoured fruit variety could be transported west and reared in the orchards of Babylon, and later in Greece, then Rome and eventually in Britain. A much-loved classic of nature writing from environmentalist and the author of Waterlog, Roger Deakin, Wildwood is an exploration of the element wood in nature, our culture and our lives. The ash tree is the most common tree in the Kent Downs. With its latin name of Fraxinus excelsior (‘excelsior’ meaning higher), it is often one of the tallest trees in the woods growing to over 35m. There are approximately 150 million mature ash trees in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales and over 2.2 billion trees including saplings. They are shade tolerant when young and demand more light as they grow. They are often found in mixed species woods and they are noticeable as a common hedgerow tree, where they grow tall and majestic, with narrow crowns. Their leaf pattern offers a certain quality of light in the woods that they populate. The ash tree is also one of our most ancient trees, they can live up to 400 years old and have appeared in pollen records and ancient mythologies for centuries.