Just across the garden from the summer kitchen is the sauna, another half-cob, half-wooden shed, heated by a wood-stove with a water tank perched above it. In its cool, shadowy, whitewashed interior I find a bench on which to sit naked in the steamy heat, a plastic bowl and mug, a large jug and a bunch of leafy oak twigs for the traditional mild self-flagellation. Here again, the drainage pipe runs off conveniently into an irrigation trench in the vegetable garden. Walnut Tree Farm features prominently in Roger’s writing, highlighting the essential role that the place had in his life. In 1969 he bought the moated Suffolk farmhouse, along with 12 acres of meadows, from a local farmer who had been keeping pigs in the semi-derelict house. Roger stripped the Elizabethan-era structure down to the original skeleton of oak, ash and chestnut timbers — 323 in all, and he estimated that 300 trees would have been felled to build it. Gradually Roger rebuilt Walnut Tree, sleeping in a bivouac with his cats inside the huge central fireplace until he created himself a bedroom. Jeff Barrett, ed. (2009). Caught by the River: a collection of words on water. ISBN 978-1-84403-667-7. Perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Colin Tudge, Roger Deakin's unmatched exploration of our relationship with trees is autobiography, history, traveller's tale and incisive work in natural history. It will take you into the heart of the woods, where we go 'to grow, learn and change' Deakin married Jenny Hind in 1973 with whom he had a son, Rufus, before the marriage was dissolved in 1982. [1] Deakin died, aged 63, in Mellis, Suffolk. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumour only four months previously.

Wildwood - Penguin Books UK Wildwood - Penguin Books UK

It was at Walnut Tree Farm that Roger Deakin dedicated almost four decades to the practice of bioregionalism, developing an intimate knowledge of his local landscape and the natural world around him. Here he swam in the moat, slept in the old shepherd’s hut, crawled in the hedge and worked the land: sawing, chopping, raking, hoeing, mowing, scything, planting, harvesting and building. Roger did this because, as he wrote in a notebook: “People ask how a writer connects with the land. The answer is through work.” 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. I remember entering the steep-eaved barn into whose topmost room the archive had slowly been gathered. Up two ladders, through a trapdoor, and into the narrow attic. Dusty slant light from a gable window. And boxes: 60 or 70 of them, all but filling the space. A life condensed to a room. I felt overwhelmed, partly by sadness and partly by hopelessness. How could this volume of documents ever be brought under control? A much-loved classic of nature writing from environmentalist and the author of Waterlog, Roger Deakin, Wildwood is an exploration of the element wood in nature, our culture and our lives. Roger Deakin era um homem que amava a floresta e a natureza, gostava de referir que tinha seiva nas suas veias, nos anos 60 compra Walnut Tree Farm, uma pequena propriedade com cerca de uma dezena de hectares, na zona de Mellis, Suffolk, com uma casa em ruínas que vai recuperando.A favoured apple tree could be reliably propagated only by cutting scions from it and grafting them. Scions could be preserved and carried by driving the ends of the stems into a hard fruit such as a quince. Thus, the favoured fruit variety could be transported west and reared in the orchards of Babylon, and later in Greece, then Rome and eventually in Britain. I’m sad to leave the solitary Valery, whom I instinctively like. When we shake hands, it is the two-handed lingering double-clasp kind with a deep look into the eye. The look says, ‘We come from vast distances apart on this earth, yet I feel a natural, spontaneous respect for you. It is very moving, that we far-flung people from different tribes are clearly first natural friends, not enemies at all.’ I very nearly catch myself making the little speech, but restrain myself in time. Luisa and I buy a litre jar of Valery’s best wild apple-blossom honey to share. When Valery hands it over, it feels like a blessing—the palpable proof of the goodness and beauty of the place, and the wild apples. I experience the same feeling when I look around the faces of my new friends: the first thing I see in them is their beauty, and I rejoice in the diversity of human genes that made them, as the flower genes seeking each other in the pollen made the honey. He was born in Watford in 1943, an only child who lost his father when he was 17 - it was his uncle who taught him to swim. After the publication of Waterlog in 1999, never a month passed by but a journalist or camera crew would arrive to film him swimming at Mellis, the inspiration and the start of his many journeys. Deakin made several radio programmes for the BBC about the ideas, philosophy and the inspiration that came from the fresh water spring at the bottom of his moat. Sadly, in the years of recent droughts, the surface of the moat had fallen by a couple of feet.

Roger Deakin Quotes (Author of Waterlog) - Goodreads Roger Deakin Quotes (Author of Waterlog) - Goodreads

Roger Deakin (2007). Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees. Hamish Hamilton Ltd. ISBN 978-0-241-14184-7. He is survived by his partner Alison Hastie and his son. [1] His archive has been given to the University of East Anglia, including writings on ancient trees, along with film banks, photographs, journals and Deakin's swimming trunks. [2] The nature writer Robert Macfarlane was Deakin's literary executor. He commented: I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted. A boomer, he grew up in a postwar era of optimism and economic prosperity, a working-class scholarship boy at Haberdashers’ Aske’s (“we knew how to use the apostrophe”) who went on to a dreamlike Cambridge of punting and Pimm’s. He became a successful advertising executive, was pursued by any number of girls, then found a ruined farmhouse in Suffolk to which, aged 31, he retired. He then teaches, swims, gets involved in the local “faires”, which are like mini East Anglian Glastonburys, befriends Richard Branson and Andrea Arnold, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. He’s a terrible poet but a beautiful writer of prose, and records his life as if he knows that a book like this will one day be written about it.

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We are by now on the open steppe, bowling along the very same route taken by Fitzroy Maclean on his first, covert, journey to Almaty in 1936, in the days of the Soviet Empire. Beyond the avenues of roadside trees, Kazakh horsemen are herding their cattle, some of them tiny dots on the distant plains of endless brown grass and dust. Dogs and foals run across the steppe. Lively streams skirt the road on either side, and in the foreground are commercial apple orchards of oft-pruned trees no one has got round to replacing. Isa calls them middle aged. Cattle graze beneath the apples while their cowhands stretch out in the shade and sleep. We pass a man wheeling a slopping milk churn on wheels. A transhumant bee-keeper’s caravan full of hives ready to be towed up by tractor into the forest is parked by a barn.