Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

by Roger Deakin

Overview

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.

Deakin lives in forest shacks, goes "coppicing" in Suffolk, swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc, and hunts bushplums with Aboriginal women in the outback. Along the way, he ferrets out the mysteries of woods, detailing the life stories of the timber beams composing his Elizabethan house and searching for the origin of the apple.

As the world's forests 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416595328
Publisher:	Free Press
Publication date:	12/01/2010
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, was a writer, broadcaster, and filmmaker. His previous book, Waterlog, has been hailed as a classic of nature writing.

Editorial Reviews

."..[Deakin is] a congenial traveling companion in an invigorating romp...His writing reflects that fresh and tentative spirit...contains nuggets of wood lore beyond its obvious uses for food, animal fodder and building material." -- "The Washington Post"

."..A rip-roaring yarn...To Deakin, trees represented life's possibilities for adventure, passion, freedom and prosperity...[An] ambling and inspired meditation on humanity's relationship with woods of all kinds..." -- "San Francisco Chronicle"

."..Deakin, a modern-day Thoreau, has an endearing affinity for the wildness of nature, and on page after page he brings to life the poetry of trees and finds beauty in a simpler, more agrarian lifestyle..." -- "Wisconsin State Journal"

"A masterpiece which deserves to be read and reread." -- "The Guardian"

"A work of immense charm and verbal brilliance." -- "The Herald"

"An enchanting book, the prose is so alert and alive. Roger Deakin can be counted one of the greatest of all nature writers." -- "The Mail on Sunday"

"Breathtaking" -- "The Sunday Times"

"I have never read anything that better evokes the experience of wandering in woodland." -- "The Independent"

"Part "Walden", part "Road to Oxiana"...this will hopefully bring Deakin to the attention of American readers who will find him a kindred spirit to Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry." -- "Kirkus Reviews" (starred review)

"Roger Deakin is a latter-day Thoreau." -- Robert Macfarlane, author of "The Wild Places"

From the Publisher

Part Walden, part Road to Oxiana: The late British natural-history writer Deakin (Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain, 1999) serves up an elegant meditation on trees and why they matter. Put it down to the Druids and the Green Man, but folks back in the mother country love all things tree-related. They like toads, moles, sheep and suchlike critters, too, whence the deserved centrality of The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit and the Pooh quartet, among other celebrations of country living. As Deakin puts it, they like these things perhaps precisely because they have lost so much of their rural heritage in recent decades, so that "the British generally take a correspondingly greater interest in what trees and woods they still have left." Deakin, a literate chap, adds Gerald Manley Hopkins, Henry David Thoreau and Patrick Leigh Fermor to the mix, plus the Whole Earth Catalog, under whose influence he set about on an exercise in hippie communard living back in the day. But he was no latecomer. As he writes, he comes from a long, proud tradition of forest people, with fitting names in the family tree such as Wood and Greenwood, and forebears who belonged to the woodland-anarchist tradition of Robin Hood. To trust these pages, Deakin knows how to coppice and pollard; he writes lovingly of coops and sheds, moths and cornfields, oaks and apples. Not content to remain imprisoned in his lime-tree bower, Deakin departs midway through for a tour of other lands and other trees, venturing to East Anglia, France, Australia and Central Asia. Once the game is afoot, he writes with the studied breathlessness of David Attenborough ("We threaded our way off piste through more of the termitestalactites towards the ten-foot bushes, which, sure enough, were covered in ripe black fruit the size of small olives") and communicates that he's having the time of his life. A companion to Waterlog, this will hopefully bring Deakin to the attention of American readers, who will find him a kindred spirit to Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry and other celebrants of the land.

Kirkus Reviews