Roger Deakin (2007). Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees. Hamish Hamilton Ltd. ISBN 978-0-241-14184-7.

Roger Deakin, wild swimmer and author of Waterlogged - BBC Roger Deakin, wild swimmer and author of Waterlogged - BBC

I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted. A boomer, he grew up in a postwar era of optimism and economic prosperity, a working-class scholarship boy at Haberdashers’ Aske’s (“we knew how to use the apostrophe”) who went on to a dreamlike Cambridge of punting and Pimm’s. He became a successful advertising executive, was pursued by any number of girls, then found a ruined farmhouse in Suffolk to which, aged 31, he retired. He then teaches, swims, gets involved in the local “faires”, which are like mini East Anglian Glastonburys, befriends Richard Branson and Andrea Arnold, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. He’s a terrible poet but a beautiful writer of prose, and records his life as if he knows that a book like this will one day be written about it.Um tumor cerebral matou Roger Deakin seis meses após ter concluído o manuscrito de “Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees”. Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees” do escritor, documentarista e ambientalista Roger Deakin (1943 – 2006) é o “meu” livro. Then came a description of the author's study, all the objects in it and the memories they stirred. This one was mostly OK, although I found it a bit boring at times. means that even after death his influence continues to flow outwards […]. Though Roger is gone, many of his readers still feel a need to express […] the connection they felt with his work and world-view, and so they still write letters to him, as if he might somehow read them. As I am Roger’s literary executor, and as our writings have become intertwined, many of these letters find their way to me. They come from all over the world, and from various kinds of people: a professional surfer from Australia, a Canadian academic, an older woman from Exeter confined to her house due to mobility problems, a young man re-swimming the route of Waterlog, lake by lake and river by river, in an attempt to recover from depression […]. Green Man-like, Roger appears in unexpected places, speaking in leaves …

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees eBook : Deakin, Roger

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. Two months later, the ur-apple burst into leaf, a month later it burst into pink-white blossom, and over the summer some of those flowers set fruit. In early autumn I harvested the dozen or so small, glowing apples that had appeared on the tree, and from that “sweet feral fruit” I gathered the forty or fifty pips they held. It did not matter to me that these were unlikely to be genetically identical to the ur-apple; indeed, I felt that this blurring brought its own variegated beauty to the new fruit, much as Roger’s writing had mingled with the minds and hearts of his readers around the world. 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. Now it is my turn. Topping up my glass for courage, I speak of Kazakhstan’s two great gifts to the world: the cultivated apple and the tamed horse. However, I say with a flourish, I have today discovered a third: the best hospitality in the world. And so it goes on, with more toasts, and yet more elaborate and sincere compliments, all expressed in the declamatory tones of a bard reciting an epic poem. Since the Kazakhs are the proud possessors of a great tradition of oral poetry, passed on by the bards, or akyns, in competitive recitals known as aiytis, it is not surprising that oratory seemed to come quite naturally to those present.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. Magnificant raft spiders Dolomedes fimbriatus, lived in 'great numbers' in Second Bog, and we observed how they would submerge, when alarmed by us, clasping little air-bubble diving bells like bright pearls for as much as 20 minutes at a time. We timed their dives with nerdish precision.' I spent the afternoon wandering around the farm, exploring the landscape. There was a quiet stillness to the place — a melancholy of loss. But at the same time, everywhere I looked I could see Roger’s presence: it overflowed from the lush wildness encroaching every inch of the landscape; and in the material objects of shepherd huts, abandoned vehicles, his chair by the moat, the piles of wood he had chopped, and the bath tub in which he wallowed. Walnut Tree Farm is the place that Roger built, created from the deep and mutual relationship of a man and the land, intimately shaping each other. Here, published for the first time in the United States, is the last book by Roger Deakin, famed British nature writer and icon of the environmentalist movement. In Deakin's glorious meditation on wood, the 'fifth element' -- as it exists in nature, in our culture, and in our souls -- the reader accompanies Deakin through the woods of Britain, Europe, Kazakhstan, and Australia in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with trees. What follows here is a chapter from Roger’s Wildwood, to which I have written a short postscript essay that tells—by means of the story of a seed and a tree—how Roger continues to root and branch through my life and the lives of many others, long after his death. 1 East to Eden