posted on 18 Mar 2016

Wildwood by Roger Deakin

Roger Deakin’s superlative Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, published by Hamish Hamilton in 2007 and in paperback by Penguin in 2008, is one of those books that many readers take to their hearts, its delights all the more poignant for the fact that Deakin finished the manuscript only shortly before his tragically early death aged 63 in 2006.

This book followed Waterlog, his extremely successful journal of ‘wild swimming’, and his last book, Notes from Walnut Farm, extracts from his final journals, was read on Radio 4.

But despite (and perhaps even because of) the extensive coverage of Deakin and his work, Wildwood was a book I approached with some reservations. I love the idea of English nature writing, but have to acknowledge that the classics of the genre – Walton, Gilbert White, Kilvert, Richard Jefferies – usually defeat me. And then there is Deakin himself: privately educated (Haberdashers’ Aske’s School) graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge, lifelong environmentalist, owner of a lovingly restored Tudor farmhouse. It all sounded a bit worthy and posh, and none of it predisposed me to Wildwood. If I hadn’t seen the very attractive Penguin paperback for a couple of quid in a charity bookshop I would certainly never have read it – and it would have been my loss.

For Wildwood is a book that confounds expectations – as does Deakin. His work is certainly in the tradition of English nature writing; it also owes something to the American Transcendentalists and later US nature writers such as Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez and Diane Ackerman – and yet he is also unlike all of these writers, his work distinguished by the diversity of his interests and the extent to which his vision is informed by literature and the visual arts. Indeed, it is perhaps this most of all which makes his work so appealing, especially to those – like me – whose primary interest is not nature.

The sub-title of the book may be “a journey through trees”, and certainly trees do feature extensively and are a key unifier of the book’s subject matter, but the real pleasure of Wildwood lies in the fact that everything is refracted through the lens of Deakin’s sensibility. It is this that gives the book both its extraordinary breadth and its cohesiveness. And little seems to escape Deakin’s scrutiny. The Green Man, cricket bats, pencils, the sculptor David Nash (a “virtuoso” of the chainsaw whose aim is to resurrect trees in another form), neolithic henges, moths, Jaguar sports cars, rookeries, the rural visionary painter Mary Newcomb, apple tree cultivation in Central Asia, and the comforts of timber cabins, soft lamplight and long nights – all of these and more are here. And while the book is crammed with incident and insight and intriguing digressions, nothing seems anomalous or out of place: everything it touches on is somehow unified into a coherent whole.

Deakin may be a nature writer, but he is of a particularly idiosyncratic type. In fact, Wildwood reminds me most strongly not of other nature writers but of Modern Nature and Smiling in Slow Motion, Derek Jarman’s remarkable late journals. There even seem to be some similarities between the two men. Both have keenly developed aesthetic sensibilities; both in their very different ways were hedonists and lived lives devoted to the things that gave them pleasure (even and perhaps especially when this meant doing without other conventional comforts); and both died far too young.

Deakin seems to have led a life devoted to the art of what might be called “slow living”, made possible, one suspects, by a private income (however modest – perhaps it costs very little to live as he did) and the constraints of his chosen austerity. To read him – as with Jarman – is to be in the presence of a strong and unmistakeable personality that one regrets not knowing more intimately. I shall read his other books – and I won’t be waiting to find them by chance, in a charity  shop.

Alun Severn

March 2016