With this book Roger Deakin can be counted one of the greatest of all nature writers. His beautiful book should serve to make us appreciate more keenly all that we have here on earth * Mail on Sunday * When you enter the water, something, like a metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking glass surface and enter a new world in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim.”

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

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.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. That mission has outlasted him, and this extraordinary insight into his life will lend new complexity and reach to the network.

Roger Deakin - Wikipedia Roger Deakin - Wikipedia

One of my favourite kind of books. Few books make you change your habits; this one changed mine -- Will Self * New Statesman *The real wages of potters are in the daily silent appreciations of each of their customers as they pour the morning tea from their teapot, or drink coffee from their mug, or eat dinner off their plate. To be this involved in the daily lives of people who appreciate and admire your work enough to buy it must bring deep reassurance. It is a kind of immortality you can enjoy while still living. 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 is about the element wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and our lives. 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. 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.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (Audio Download): Roger

It was enough. I began the eerie, often mournful and sometimes funny process of working out what Roger had left behind. Digging through boxes. Brushing away mouse droppings and spiders' webs. Letters from friends, readers and lovers. A scribbled poem "To Pan". A folder titled "Drowning (Coroners)", which turned out not to be a record of coroners that he had drown- ed, but an account of his research into East Anglian deaths-by-water. It was hard not to get distracted, especially with his notebooks. Each was a small landscape through which it was possible to wander, and within which it was possible to get lost. As I read them, I could sometimes hear him speaking the words, in his scratchy, deep voice. Friendship, I now know, is something that continues after death. We carry on conversing with the dead, running things by them, listening to what they have to say.

I read the catalogue with trepidation, anxious at the thought of seeing Roger's life reduced to a data-set. But it turned out to be a wonderful document: an accidental epic prose-poem of his life, or a dendrological cross-section of his mind. File RD/TW/5/1/7, for instance, contains entries for: "Calvados; bristlecone pines; dachas; diving; jungle boys and land girls; pixies; protestors; skylarks; timber frame houses" – along with about 70 others: a zany haberdashery of Roger's interests. Cryptic entries abound: "The Oriental Rat Flea" or "Nudged by Languid Mullet". File RD/WLOG/1/1/2 contains "Complete MS of Waterlog with corrections. (With a strong fishy smell)". All of us , I believe , carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there :places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem'We are seven' ,our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened.By way of returning the compliment , we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far from them.”