Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin
397 pages
Published 2007
Read from April 1 to April 26
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
It
is perhaps inevitable to frame my impression of this book in terms of
woodlands. Deakin ambles along through a series of thematically linked
but autonomous essays, taking the time to savor berries and nuts and
dabble his feet in streams, lingering in sun-dappled glades where a
gleam of insight or a beam of brilliance or a sudden startle of
magnificent words slip through the green, wandering away from the main
path and talking to shepherds and hippies and sculptors, following the
flow of water and seasons and genes, getting lost and liking it that
way. His path has no set destination; you can pick up the book at any
point and follow him along, absorbed in the minute vistas he details,
the loving, lingering attention he gives to everything from the
large-scale transpiration of David Nash's Wooden Boulder to the
folk ubiquity of the Green Man in Devonshire church carving to the
symbiotic inseparability of fire and ecology in pre-Cook Australia. He
narrates the history of the wood in his furnishings and describes
shaping his hedges. He delights in observation with an artist's eye and a
humanist's boundless heart. Certain ideas and phrases reappear along
his meanderings like vegetative shoots of beech pushing up amid the
other trees beside the path. (I don't know whether this was a thematic
choice or a sad inevitability of circumstance; Deakin died "shortly
after completing the manuscript for Wildwood," and it's possible
the editorial staff took a somber, hands-off approach to his words.)
Deakin has what I think is a gift for simile. Describing the process of
adding blackthorn drupes to make sloe gin, he writes, "[The drupes] are
always best fully ripened after the first frost, then posted one by one
down the gullet of a bottle of cheap supermarket gin with added sugar,
as geese are forcefed for pâté in the Dordogne." Once in a while he
dawdles just a bit too long along the way, chatting up old artist
friends and savoring the heft of willow cricket bats, but the journey is
never without its charm, its leaf-peep revelations. It doesn't matter
how long the excursion lasts; this book is made for desultory sampling
and quiet reverie.
What confirmed this book as one of my absolute
favorites so far this year was the interlude Deakin spent exulting in
the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan and the wild walnut forests of
Kyrgyzstan. For years now I've known of no more appealing landscape than
the steppe valleys of Tuva and Altai, but in these wild fruit and nut
forests Deakin paints a word-picture so heartbreakingly lovely and
unforgettable that I can't hope to convey the effect it had on me, or
the hold those lands now have on my mind. No weaver of fantasy could
ever imagine a country so divine. Deakin's words carry such gentle,
patient conviction that it almost doesn't matter what the truth on the
ground might be; with effortless proselytism Deakin has converted me.
Corny as it may sound, I believe in his Eden.
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