Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

Product Information

More wine ensues, with a magnificent forest fruit salad, honey, fresh green walnuts, melon, cakes, more chai, and further, supplementary toasts and votes of thanks. After all this high drama, Isa declares an interval, during which we will take the afternoon air outdoors, work up more appetite, dream up more toasts and await the presentation of the next course or two. A little folk-band with an accordion, a two-stringed dombra and a drum like an Irish bodrun plays Kazakh tunes. One of the trees is massive, its branches apparently full of fruit, but as I approach closer I realize I am not seeing apples but yellowing autumn leaves caught in glancing sunlight.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees eBook : Deakin, Roger

With Waterlog Deakin broke new ground, as well as water: it was both travel writing and nature study and very personal. 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. In 1936 Fitzroy Maclean, whose book Eastern Approaches had informed my own journey, travelled exactly the same way on his first excursion out of Almaty, finding a place on a lorry heading out of the city.Undoubtedly we’re seeing the man more completely than before, perhaps more clearly than he saw himself. After a long struggle to preserve the local as well as the global natural world, the drought and the cold of recent months in Britain had made him wonder whether the war to save the planet from the gloomy prospect of terminal climate change might have been lost. A life lived as variously as his, with the gift for inspiration that his writing possesses, means that his influence ripples unpredictably outwards.

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

Luisa is learning to drive and has taken a lesson on the way out to the airport with her instructor, Johnny, who drives us back into town at breakneck speed in his Lada along wide, empty boulevards of limes with whitewashed trunks. Let loose on a personal garden city like Letchworth, Welwyn or Hampstead Garden Suburb, I would end up with something between a shanty town and an allotment. Photograph: Roger Deakin archive UEA ‘At once liberated and rooted’: Roger Deakin at his Suffolk farmhouse. I wander up a steep path and sample some sweet feral fruit, slipping the apple pips into my trouser pocket for later planting in Suffolk. I remember entering the steep-eaved barn into whose topmost room the archive had slowly been gathered.

Anecdotal, personal, experiential, the journey began in Deakin's own 16th-century farm moat at Mellis, near Diss in Suffolk, just a couple of dozen or so yards long and six yards wide, but as clean and clear as any water anywhere - and kept that way by the weeds and snails that Deakin cared for. 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. He would disappear for long weekends in his sky-blue Morgan (not always alone), until in 1968 he found the tumbling Elizabethan moated farmhouse on the edge of Mellis Common, and began an endless loving process of refurbishing it, restoring it, but never "renovating". Angels are the people we care for and who care for us," the page read, beautifully and fortuitously, in Roger's spidery black hand-writing.