Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

Product Information

So in the strange months after his death, it became clear that the main question facing me as executor was what to do with his vast archive: the many hundreds of notebooks, draft manuscripts, box-files, cassettes and journals in which he had recorded his life. But finally there I was, flying into Almaty at two in the morning to meet Luisa, Barrie Juniper’s friend and interpreter. In our narrow Bayswater kitchen was earthenware trove he had found in southern Spain, from Antonio Sala's kiln in a village near Gerona in Catalonia. I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted.

Ash trees - Fraxinus excelsior - Ash tree identification Ash trees - Fraxinus excelsior - Ash tree identification

Anecdotal, personal, experiential, the journey began in Deakin's own 16th-century farm moat at Mellis, near Diss in Suffolk, just a couple of dozen or so yards long and six yards wide, but as clean and clear as any water anywhere - and kept that way by the weeds and snails that Deakin cared for.It always seemed that our paths would cross in mutual literary-environmental circles: I would send him exhibition-opening invitations, but later hear through mutual friends that he was too busy to attend as he hurriedly worked away to finish the writing of Wildwood; and then he became ill, and died quickly. 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. The person who perhaps knew him longest, Margot Waddell, mused that “he never swims below the surface … I don’t think he quite realised there was a choice.

Wildwood Quotes by Roger Deakin - Goodreads Wildwood Quotes by Roger Deakin - Goodreads

More wine ensues, with a magnificent forest fruit salad, honey, fresh green walnuts, melon, cakes, more chai, and further, supplementary toasts and votes of thanks. Beside a black mulberry tree he planted thirty years ago outside the porters’ lodge at St Catherine’s College Oxford, I met Barrie, a don of the college, luminary of the Oxford Plant Sciences Department and apple guru. I was new to death then, but even had I not been, the loss of Roger would still have struck hard to my heart. All of us , I believe , carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there :places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem'We are seven' ,our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened.

Isa Baitulin has invited Dr Kuralay Karibaia, a jolly, brown-haired woman dressed in jeans and a red-and-black baseball jacket. G. Sebald (Hamburger appears in Sebald’s masterpiece, Die Ringe des Saturn / The Rings of Saturn), and cultivated an apple orchard, becoming notably expert in coaxing obscure apple varieties to grow successfully from seed rather than from graft.