Roger Deakin - Wildwood: a Journey Through Trees

Wildwood

Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, shortly after completing the manuscript for Wildwood, was a writer, broadcaster and filmmaker with a particular interest in nature and the environment. He lived for many years in Suffolk, where he swam regularly in his moat, in the River Waveney and in the sea, in between travelling widely through the landscapes he writes about in his book. Waterlog, the predecessor to Wildwood, recounts his swimming adventures and has been hailed as a classic of nature writing.

A writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just to reflect or report them as they are. Mine is to promote a feeling for the importance of trees through a greater understanding of them, so that people dont just think of trees as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.

Roger Deakin

Praise for Waterlog

A simply wonderful book A delightfully eccentric masterpiece Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

A delicious, cleansing, funny, wise and joyful book, so wonderfully full of energy and life. I love it Jane Gardam

Deakins evocation of place is superb Robert McCrum

A triumph of topographical and naturalist writing to weave environmental and cultural concerns so deftly together in this enchanting and original travel book is a real achievement Independent

A Journey Through Trees

ROGER DEAKIN

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

HAMISH HAMILTON

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2007

Text copyright The Estate of Roger Deakin, 2007
Illustrations copyright David Holmes, David Nash, Mary Newcomb, 2007

Original chapter illustrations throughout by David Holmes, excluding illustration on p. 151 by David Nash and
illustration on p. 179 by Mary Newcomb

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased
to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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Set in 12/14.75 pt Monotype Dante

EISBN: 9780141900513

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For Alison

For a year I travelled amphibiously about the country, swimming in the wild, literally immersing myself in the landscape and in the elements, in particular the primal element of water, in an attempt to discover for myself that third thing D. H. Lawrence puzzled about in his poem of that title. Water, he wrote, is something more than the sum of its parts, something more than two parts hydrogen and one of oxygen. In writing Waterlog, the account of my meanderings, swimming was a metaphor for what Keats called taking part in the existence of things.

Now it seemed logical to plunge into what Edward Thomas called the fifth element: the element of wood. Swimming in the Helford River, where the oaks stretch out their branches level with the water to dip into it at high tide, or on Dartmoor, going against the current with the running salmon in the steeply wooded Dart, I realized the logic of Patrick Leigh Fermors superb Between the Woods and the Water. In the woods, there is a strong sense of immersion in the dancing shadow play of the leafy depths, and the rise and fall of the sap that proclaims the seasons is nothing less than a tide, and no less influenced by the moon.

It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it makes in the wind. If Waterlog was about the element of water, Wildwood is about the element of wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and in our lives.

To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. Merlin sends the future King Arthur as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in The Sword in the Stone. There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and the trees. In As You Like It, the banished Duke Senior goes to live in the Forest of Arden like Robin Hood, and in Midsummer Nights Dream the magical metamorphosis of the lovers takes place in a wood outside Athens that is quite obviously an English wood, full of the faeries and Robin Goodfellows of our folklore.

Pinned on my study wall is a still from Truffauts LEnfant Sauvage. It shows Victor, the feral boy, clambering through the tangle of branches of the dense deciduous woods of the Aveyron. The film remains one of my touchstones for thinking about our relations with the natural world: a reminder that we are not so far away as we like to think from our cousins the gibbons, who swing like angels through the forest canopy, at such headlong speed that they almost fly like the tropical birds they envy and emulate in the music of their marriage-songs at dawn in the treetops. To begin where I began, my mothers name was Wood. The third of my fathers three Christian names was Greenwood: Alvan Marshall Greenwood Deakin. My great-grandfather had the timber yard in Walsall: Woods of Walsall. So I am one of the Wood tribe, and, although I have read Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders many times over, the story of Marty South, Giles Winterbourne and Grace Melbury always moves me more than anything else I know. I am a woodlander; I have sap in my veins. My great-uncle on my fathers side was Joseph Deakin, framed and imprisoned at the age of twenty by Lord Salisburys government in 1892 as one of the Walsall Anarchists. He became Librarian at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, where he continued his self-education with the help of William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other early socialists. He was a true defender of the greenwood spirit of democratic freedom, and I always think of him as belonging to the outlaw tradition of Robin Hood.