2019 read #2: Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin
Edited by Alison Hastie and Terrence Blacker
302 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 28, 2018 to January 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Roger Deakin is one of my all-time favorite authors, though in his lifetime he only published one book (Waterlog) and finished the manuscript for one other (Wildwood). Not long after I read Waterlog, I ordered a copy of Walnut Tree Farm, a collection of Deakin's journal entries from his later years, collated and compiled into a single "year" of entries—natural history observations, musings on pollarding and sustainable uses of common land, mixed together with rather more personal entries on Deakin's boyhood, his loneliness and horniness living alone at the namesake farm, his crabby misanthropy toward suburbanites and women out jogging who don't respond to his hellos.

I held off from reading Notes for all these years, possibly because I didn't want to read the last published words to come from his pen. Having finally read his journals, I'm left with a feeling of knowing a little bit too much about him—that maybe I didn't need my image of Deakin the sensitive and perceptive eccentric who soaked up woods and waters in all the forgotten little nooks of England to be replaced with a more grounded, less ethereal image of a cranky old goat alternating between lustful fantasies and "things will never be as good as they were when I was a boy" conservatism.

Notes is a strange document, a posthumous publication of diaries never intended to be made public. It's full of lovely observations of the natural world around Deakin's farm and the adjoining common, arranged in a seasonal cycle, ending in a lovely and sad moment of shooting stars, which could easily have been purpose-written to serve as a coda for Deakin's life. But in revealing so much of the man behind the words, Notes can only make him appear more human, more fragile and fallible.

Deakin's diaries often dwell on the topic of how people no longer appreciate the natural world and what it has to offer, contrasting the modern suburbanized state with his own idyllic recollections of childhood adventures along creeks and in copses. One might question just how attuned most English folks were to natural cycles of subsistence during Deakin's golden age, but we'll leave that aside. I find myself interested in the conservative roots of conservation. You can catch a whiff of nativism in a lot of these lovely works of English nature writing, this idea that "the old ways are the best" for conserving the health and vitality of the English natural world. "People these days" (meaning urbanized people, technocratic people, often the agents from a central government body, sometimes immigrant populations) just aren't in touch with the real life of the hedgerows and little waterways, just don't understand how to manage land in harmony with the plants and creatures that share it.

I'm reminded of how much our American, Muir-inspired "wilderness" ethos derives from the proto-fascist Rousseau, and erases millennia of Native history and land-use practices with the words "where Man himself is a visitor and does not remain."

It's a troubling ideological heritage for us to unpack. Our species and our culture need to do what we can to ameliorate the massive extinction event we're inflicting upon the world, but we have to do so together—not by excluding "people these days," however they might be coded.