Overview
Here, published for the first time in the United States, is the last book by Roger Deakin, famed British nature writer and icon of the environmentalist movement. In Deakin's glorious meditation on wood, the "fifth element" — as it exists in nature, in our culture, and in our souls — the reader accompanies Deakin through the woods of Britain, Europe, Kazakhstan, and Australia in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with trees.
Deakin lives in forest shacks, goes "coppicing" in Suffolk, swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc, and hunts bushplums with Aboriginal women in the outback. Along the way, he ferrets out the mysteries of woods, detailing the life stories of the timber beams composing his Elizabethan house and searching for the origin of the apple.
As the world's forests are whittled away, Deakin's sparkling prose evokes woodlands anarchic with life, rendering each tree as an individual, living being. At once a traveler's tale and a splendid work of natural history, Wildwood reveals, amid the world's marvelous diversity, that which is universal in human experience.
Synopsis
Here, published for the first time in the United States, is the last book by Roger Deakin, famed British nature writer and icon of the environmentalist movement. In Deakin's glorious meditation on wood, the "fifth element" — as it exists in nature, in our culture, and in our souls — the reader accompanies Deakin through the woods of Britain, Europe, Kazakhstan, and Australia in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with trees.
Deakin lives in forest shacks, goes "coppicing" in Suffolk, swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc, and hunts bushplums with Aboriginal women in the outback. Along the way, he ferrets out the mysteries of woods, detailing the life stories of the timber beams composing his Elizabethan house and searching for the origin of the apple.
As the world's forests are whittled away, Deakin's sparkling prose evokes woodlands anarchic with life, rendering each tree as an individual, living being. At once a traveler's tale and a splendid work of natural history, Wildwood reveals, amid the world's marvelous diversity, that which is universal in human experience.
Publishers Weekly
In this last book before his death in 2006, Deakin (Waterlog) delights with his curiosity and affection for rambling forests in Europe and Australia. The book is as much about the woodland animals and humans engaged with forest life as it is about the trees, the rooks "flinging themselves into a strong wind and somersaulting wildly upward, then diving straight down again into the woods like bungee jumpers"; the Essex Moth Group clustering around a mercury lamp to view moths with poetic names like "the willow beauty, the dingy footman, the clouded silver"; and artists engaging with nature, like John Wolseley, inspired by the fire-struck Australian Whipstick Forest to create works expressing "all the urgency and energy of the racing bushfire itself." Deakin's lyrical, sometimes anthropomorphic portraits of trees and wood are saturated with his scientific knowledge and passion: a hazel branch, "more of a magician's staff than a walking stick... naturally fluted and spiraled by the strangling effect of the honeysuckle stem that still encircled it like an asp... was a masterpiece of nature, the voluptuous embrace of the honeysuckle exciting the hazel into a frenzy of cell division." (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Editorials
Publishers Weekly
In this last book before his death in 2006, Deakin (Waterlog) delights with his curiosity and affection for rambling forests in Europe and Australia. The book is as much about the woodland animals and humans engaged with forest life as it is about the trees, the rooks "flinging themselves into a strong wind and somersaulting wildly upward, then diving straight down again into the woods like bungee jumpers"; the Essex Moth Group clustering around a mercury lamp to view moths with poetic names like "the willow beauty, the dingy footman, the clouded silver"; and artists engaging with nature, like John Wolseley, inspired by the fire-struck Australian Whipstick Forest to create works expressing "all the urgency and energy of the racing bushfire itself." Deakin's lyrical, sometimes anthropomorphic portraits of trees and wood are saturated with his scientific knowledge and passion: a hazel branch, "more of a magician's staff than a walking stick... naturally fluted and spiraled by the strangling effect of the honeysuckle stem that still encircled it like an asp... was a masterpiece of nature, the voluptuous embrace of the honeysuckle exciting the hazel into a frenzy of cell division." (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
With Wood as a family name and a great-grandfather who owned a timber yard, it is not surprising that British nature writer Deakin felt as strong a tie to the forest as to water, which he chronicled in his first book, Waterlog. From his school days of taking ecological surveys in a nearby forest to his adult years as a woodworker, trees have played an important role in his life. In this posthumous work, Deakin, who died in 2006, takes the reader on nature forays throughout his native England and beyond, where he meets an eclectic host of people including artists and scientists who live and work with trees. During his travels, he visits such places as a Jaguar factory, the dusty outback of Australia, the birthplace of apples in the Tien Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan, and a dismal World War II-ravaged region of Poland. Liberally sprinkled with literary allusions, forest lore and myth, and instructions on forestry practices such as coppicing trees, this memoir, travelog, and natural history work will find a comfortable place in public libraries.
—Maureen J. Delaney-Lehman