Roger Deakin, Wildwood

There was a time when I would've thrilled to almost everything about Roger Deakin's 2007 book Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees.

It's truly a remarkable book, and it's made more poignant by the simple fact that at only 63, four months after completing Wildwood, Roger Deakin passed away from cancer that had been diagnosed shortly after he'd finished writing.

Predictably, the Guardian review on the occasion of the book's initial publication does a great job of articulating the likely response from readers. The book's British sections are incredible for being so closely observed, so intimately authoritative, and the sections from elsewhere seem to come from a different kind of travel book. The non-UK sections are really nature travel, and certainly I can see why he would've wanted his readers to come with him as he learns, for example, about the origins of apples in the mountains of Kazakhstan. It's just that, as interesting as they are, those sections aren't the same as the English sections, because no one but Roger Deakin could've written this way about his home places.

In an early chapter, for example, Deakin sleeps outdoors in Slough Grove in Colchester, not far from Little Horkesley Hall, so that he can listen to the birds at dawn. There's a rookery, in particular, that he has been excited to spend time at, but by morning his senses have blown fully open. To quote at some length:

"As the sun came up over the hilltop meadow and shone through the wood, it began to catch the nettle-tops standing sentinel around the glade in flashes of dewy silver, outlining the saw blade of every translucent leaf. It even illuminated the tracery of veins in the wings of the crane-flies before my tent. The misty sun, rising fast now, broke through an oak in the hazel grove and set the lichened ash-trunks on fire. By now the more melodic music of the other birds had found its rhythm and built into full flow: the soft cooing of wood-pigeons, the lyrical blackcaps and lesser whitethroats, the piping of robins and wrens, chiffchaffs and the confident glissando of the chaffinches." (p51)

Yanked out of context like this, it'll sound to some readers like purple prose. In context, there's just no other way to articulate the heightened sense of place that Deakin builds up to. Just a few chapters in, even someone new to Deakin would recognize his deep sensitivity to the ecological details of a place. Not every reader would want to read it, but that's fine. I don't want to read plenty of unaccountably popular stuff, but the different is that I'm right, and you're wrong.

Except that also I got frustrated by the book at times. Deakin delights in eccentricity, and that's great, but lordy, does some of that ever need questioning! I'm all for letting one's freak flag fly, as it were, and there's something appealing behind the Monty Python-esque upper-class twit (especially when the person isn't upper-class) when their eccentricity involves an intensely intimate relationship with the land on which they've immersed themselves, but on the other hand....

In Australia, Deakin visits artist John Wolseley, who mentions "his Trevelyan grandfather, and his habit of dining each night in a tree house wallpapered with daily shooting tallies. Here, having donned a pheasant mask, he liked to be fed through the beak by his butler via a straw" (p266). Deakin passes no comment about this, carrying on simply to discuss more of Wolseley's art.

To be clear, no one in Deakin's England is nearly as far gone as that, and I love how committed most of his people are to preserving and documenting their patches of Olde England's woodlands and farmlands. But these are, mostly, well-off back-to-the-landers who've remained out of touch by dwelling mostly in their imaginations. That's unfair to many of them, I'm certain, and I'm not sure quite why I got as cranky as I did, but honestly, I just found the accumulation a bit much.

As I said at the opening, there was a time when I would've thrilled to almost everything about Wildwood. These days, I'm more attuned to the costs of nostalgia, how we choose what's mourned and preserved (in part because of who gets listened to at such times, and who doesn't), and the way forward to a sustainable future. There's lots to love in this book, there is, but only if it's supplemented. Among UK books I'm looking forward to as supplements, first on the list are Polly Atkin's Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better and Natasha Carthew's Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature, and Resilience.

It probably belongs on the bookshelf of classic British nature writing, though that'd have to be a fairly large bookshelf at this point.