Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

After reading this book, I wanted to know more; about the author, the places he wrote about and the people. It’s an exotic journey, several in fact and it really made me curious about the subject matter. I especially loved the intimate detail. No, we all can’t live this lifestyle but living it vicariously is better than nothing!

In the very early goings of this book (p.9), author Deakin, in describing the "bothy" that his father built for him as a lad when he was about six, writes: "Thoreau would have approved of the name we gave it: `Cosy Cabin' emblazoned on a tin sign above the door." Would he have indeed? Readers familiar with Thoreau know that there is nothing at all "cosy" about him and his writing. Sorry, but Deakin is not anywhere near a modern Thoreau, more like an anti-Thoreau in point of fact - despite "professional" reviewers claims to the contrary and the fact that Thoreau is the writer whose name is most often invoked by Deakin. Thoreau was a misanthrope. Deakin loves company. Deakin delights in the wild, open spaces - once he departs England where - to be blunt - they don't exist. Thoreau spent a night in gaol because, in part, of his objection to The Mexican War and proffers a deep, meditation on that institution in "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." Deakin visits a woodworking family and watches the Iraq war on the telly. But the essential difference, why Walden is great literature and Wildwood is not, is that Walden is filled with deep introspective insights that resonate with any poetic reader, whether he or she lives in town or country. Wildwood is stuffed with very interesting information: about trees and old customs and folkways of all sorts, woodworking, moths, walnuts, the "ur-apple," and on and on. At the end of Walden, the similarly attuned reader feels he knows Thoreau's heart and soul. At the end of Wildwood, I don't feel I know anything about Deakin at all, except that he liked trees and liked to hang around with people who liked trees as well.There are some worthwhile things here: "The Moth Wood" chapter is surely the most entrancing of the book. But, essentially, this book is best described as a chummy eco-tour of certain places and their flora and fauna. If this is all you wish from the book, it will not disappoint. If you're searching for something more profound, keep searching or perhaps re-read Walden; though from the few reviews here, I have a suspicion that none of the readers have read Walden in the first place.The last lines from Robert Frost's poem, "A Tree at My Window" kept recurring to me whilst reading this rambling account:"That day she put our heads together,Fate had her imagination about her,Your head so much concerned with outer,Mine with inner, weather."Deakin's head is very much concerned with outer weather.

My husband said, "Read this book,you will love it." He could not have been more right. I do not know when I have read a book I loved more than this journey around the world of trees. Having grown up in the Midwest, in a little Iowa town full of maple trees and river bottoms, I was so at home in this book I cried when I read the last page. I travel in Britain, particularly Wales, when I can, and have been in some of the ancient groves. I once walked a footpath through the woods near Stackpole, and got so thoroughly lost that when I emerged on a road hours later, it was a terrible shock. I had been in the world of trees. Deakin took me back to that place so thoroughly, that one night at about 3:00 I stopped reading and was surprised to find myself on my couch in front of the fire, I had been so immersed in the walnut trees of Kyrgystan. Roger Deakin is no longer on this earth, but these works of his will endure in the genre of nature writing forever.

If you have a passion for our connection to trees but not the experience of actual conversation with them Deakin will engage you as Plato in dialogues as memorable as they are true. In this grand memoir of spirit and yearning for the unobtainable, Wildwood reveals the most patient gentle and majestic creatures on earth and their unfathomable love for the human souls who thrive because of the trees and in their abundance are also destroying them. The trees have a warning for us and Deakin is their messenger. I gratefully wept when I read the final page.

Won't someone please, perhaps his friend Robert MacFarlane, go through Deakins papers so this book won't have to be his last? Another excellent book going undeservedly undernoticed and unsung. Believe it or not one of the best chapters is "Among Jaguars"-a chapter on automobiles in a book about trees; I squeal with delight! Find out a great deal about cricket bats and eel traps, and the Green Man, among other fascinating things. Squeezing himself inside a hollow thousand year old holly, full of holes and decay: "Yet the tree was in full foliage and blackbirds were sampling the first of its ripe pink berries." A book to be savored...

I am a nature lover and had this book in my cart for a year whilst I watched the price fluctuate until it became somewhat reasonably priced and I ordered it. Forced my way through half of it and gave up disappointed.

The book was great. It covers a mix of art, poetry, history and the husbandry of trees. Add to this a dose of wonder and the spirituality of places and this touches on this engaging read.

I think the books and writing of the late Roger Deakin are all marvellous. Loved Wildwood, loved Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, loved Waterlog: so sad that he has died at a relatively early age. Sadly, for readers who care about the natural environment, he will write no more.

I found this a frustrating read. While Deakin is a fine wordsmith, knowledgeable and good at conveying the sense of the places he vistits, he is overindulgent in his descriptive writing to the extent that I often found him tedious. I expected a natural history book about woods, forests and trees, and while there are decent sections that meet this description, most of the book comes across as something between a travelogue and an account of various artsy friends and acquaintances and their rustic abodes. I certainly took something from this book but even in the chapters I enjoyed - Deakin's account of the walnut forests of central Asia, for example, is fascinating - the prose is ofen rambling and there is an extraordinary amount of repetition. I would have enjoyed Wildwood much more if it had been properly edited.

Having read other peoples' reviews of this book I felt it was a must have item, and just the right kind of book for my own love of in depth research of the natural world. Well, it certainly is that! I found the life style of Roger Deakin to be almost supernatural in the sense that his days were so rich because of the minutae of a highly sensitive awareness of all that surrounded him and although his life was tragically cut short by a most terrible illness, still his legacy is so precious to everyone of us who can try to "see" the world through his special lenses. I feel that a great number of people look but don't really see anything, and this man's lifelong love for the microcosm in life was brought about fortunately for him, by the science and biology master at school whose friendship he retained till later in life by meeting up again with him to revisit the stretch of the New Forest he explored in such detail as a boy. One thing I felt however, in reading the material, was that the texture of his analysis was so dense with detail that I felt a need to drop it here and there to give my mind a little respite by reading something less involved and more facile just to take in bit by bit all the valuable insights he reveals on every page. This may be because the most part of his writing was in notebooks that piled up all over his living space so had to be compiled postumously by other writers. A rare and visionary work of art paperback but I wanted to keep making notes of my own to pick out the elements that really moved me throughout.

I found this a bit of a hard slog at times. While chapters are beautifully written there is little cohesion between chapters holding the whole book together. The book begins well with Roger describing time in his own house and lands, but as it goes on the chapters have little to do with each other past the odd mention of trees. Some chapters describe the wood and landscape in detail, others go on tangents. Reading other reviews I see Roger died before this was released, which is a pity as there is material for an excellent book, but it seems to of missed out on a stage of editing to bring it all together and remove the chaff. The chapters at the beginning and end where he is based in England were the most engaging for me. But there is a whole series of jaunts abroad making up the middle section which lost me. The trips through Australia and Russia had some nuggets, but on the whole I felt were fairly self indulgent travelogues. This book has received almost universally positive reviews, which I reckon is because the only people to finish and review it were people who loved it. I reckon the majority of people will probably leave off reading half way through and never review. But as I am stubborn I persisted to the end. There were lovely sections describing woodland in this book, but I wouldn't recommend unless you have a glut of time on your hands.

Wildwood is a fascinating and even spiritual appreciation for wood in all its various states of being and beauty, from its stately grandeur in nature and the terrible tragedy of the elm to its function within the landscape as ecological habitats and how skilled crafts persons manage and shape it into utensils, furniture and magnificent art forms.Deakin is an excellent and knowledgeable fellow, evoking a mesmerising land of lost orchards and hedgerows; his enthusiastic passion for nature and storytelling really comes across whether he is talking about the rookery and the twilight world of the woods in literature; his journeys to the New Forest and the Forest of Dean and Wye, or the Australian outback and the Russian Steppe.Trees are part of our ancestral heritage and our link back to the great wood; the familiar way markers in a landscape - the `fairy tale' woods of our childhoods, dark and haunted, imprinted upon our psyche, they remain with us. Enchanting and definitely recommended!

This was bought as a present which has now been passed on. I read parts of the book myself because I found it fascinating, and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys dipping into stories and wandering in woods.