Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

Product Information

Such places never fail to bring out the untutored architect in me, and I can’t help dreaming of constructing some variation on the theme. Beyond the avenues of roadside trees, Kazakh horsemen are herding their cattle, some of them tiny dots on the distant plains of endless brown grass and dust.

The Place That Roger Built - Places Journal The Place That Roger Built - Places Journal

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. The fierce, high fences round every little farmstead, and the dogs chained in the yards to dead hulks of cars that serve as garden sheds and kennels, set me wondering about the intriguing bandits in the hills that people have mentioned now and then. 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 was many things—a filmmaker, environmentalist, campaigner, poet, teacher—but he became best known for his trilogy of extraordinary non-fiction books about nature, people, and place: Waterlog (1999), his classic account of swimming through Britain’s rivers, lakes, estuaries, and lochs; Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (2007), which describes his years spent travelling through forests and woodland cultures in Britain, Australia, Europe, and Central Asia, as well as chronicling his long family history of radical and community involvement with trees and forestry (“I am a woodlander,” he wrote in the opening pages of that book, “I have sap in my veins”); and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (2008), which gathers decades of his writing about his home landscape in Suffolk.

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

The ur-apple seedlings flourished into ur-apple saplings, and in due course ten of those saplings were planted out by Titus in two rows, set in a stretch of field behind a steep-eaved black-timbered barn that Roger had raised himself years previously. Hamburger had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 as a child, seen action in World War II, and settled eventually in Suffolk, not far from Roger. I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted.There are fine apple orchards all over the city, as well as the wild apple woods on the slopes of the Alatau Mountains that rise like a wall behind it.

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

Topping up my glass for courage, I speak of Kazakhstan’s two great gifts to the world: the cultivated apple and the tamed horse. Unlike their English counterparts in the same Crataegus family, they are sweet, but you still have to spit out the hard pips. I was to become familiar with these elegant, water-saving devices wherever I travelled in the countryside across Central Asia. Following Roger’s untimely death from a brain tumour in August 2006, aged 63, I felt that it was important to document the landscape of Walnut Tree Farm as Roger had known it. At St Romain en Gal in the South of France, a Roman mosaic shows the progress of the apple year, from its grafting to its harvesting.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. Photograph: Roger Deakin archive UEA ‘At once liberated and rooted’: Roger Deakin at his Suffolk farmhouse.

Wildwood By Roger Deakin | Used | 9780141010014 | World of Books Wildwood By Roger Deakin | Used | 9780141010014 | World of Books

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.I am in that bemused state when you no longer comprehend what exactly is going on but quite happily luxuriate in the sheer richness of everything, the sounds of Kazakh and Russian, the rose-capped mountains, the bustling villages, the shadows of poplars, as you would in a dream. Reading his elegy, it became clear to me that I should give away the pips I had harvested from Roger’s ur-apple. 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.