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Roger Deakin, Wildwood<\/em>\u00a0 (Hamish Hamilton, \u00a320). \u00a0Reviewed for the Independent<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Greta Hopkinson was a visionary and neglected sculptress, born at the end of the 19th<\/sup> Century but having more in common with the current practice of Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. She lived in the New Forest that meant so much to Roger Deakin, and chose to work with wood that had fallen naturally into its streams.\u00a0 The water shaped these pieces into unusual twisting forms that brought out the grain in a way that no lathe or chisel could achieve. I knew her as a boy when she was in her seventies and would see her returning from a forage around the holly holms with her arms full of beech or oak, \u2018found work\u2019 which she would then shape further, or leave.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was reminded of her by this extraordinary book by Roger Deakin<\/strong>; his last, as he died shortly after its completion. The original manuscript was many times the length.\u00a0 It has been whorled down to a series of concentric and concise rings around its subject, and the result is some of the finest naturalist writing we have been lucky enough to receive for many years:\u00a0 \u2018In the pine top of my work table, the dark knots are boulders standing up in the rivers of grain, sending eddies and ripples spinning downstream, delivering the driftwood thought of a new journey to be taken, through trees.\u2019<\/p>\n An archipelago of \u2018writing sheds\u2019 are scattered in the trees around the house, some so hidden by the\u00a0 undergrowth that they resemble moles\u2019 burrows into which Deakin can\u00a0 retreat to sleep as well as write, emerging like the hero of Wind in the Willows <\/em>to greet a watery and wildwood world.\u00a0 A typical moment occurs when he awakes to find the whole hut rumbling and shaking, before realising that a roe-deer is rubbing herself against a corner of the hut, inches from his pillow.<\/p>\n From the still centre of this Suffolk home, Deakin begins his arboreal odyssey<\/strong> by travelling to the New Forest.\u00a0 As a young student, it was there he had first learnt the patient, close observation of nature which was to become his trademark:\u00a0 he describes a back-lit spider\u2019s web following the same pattern as a tree-trunk, \u2018 the radial threads representing the medullary rays of wood, along which a trunk will sometimes split as it dries\u2019.<\/p>\n . No other writer could make a mountain out of mousetail, the miniature buttercup so small as usually to escape notice, indeed so small as usually to be walked on.\u00a0 Deakin\u2019s patient investigation of its curious propagation with the help of the New Forest ponies\u00a0 – who trample and manure the ground during horse fairs –\u00a0 is a model of lucid investigation.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n From the New Forest he ventures further<\/strong>\u00a0 –\u00a0 through Devon, the Forest of Dean and abroad to the Pyrennees, Australia and the walnut trees of Kyrgyzstan \u2013 before circling back to his \u2018Heartwood\u2019 of Suffolk.\u00a0 Just as fallen wood in a forest attracts a host of funghi, bacteria, woodlice and insects, so this journey teams with ideas of startling and protean abundance:\u00a0 from why so many woodland plants should be poisonous to the use of walnut in a Jaguar\u2019s gear knob; why both moths and Nabokov\u2019s Humbert Humbert are so drawn to the light;\u00a0 even a section that harks back to Britain\u2019s pre-lithic \u2018wooden age\u2019 when great circular henges made from posts of pine or oak were built,\u00a0 anticipating Stonehenge by several millennia \u2013 indeed that monument may only have been built as a later stone complement to an original Woodhenge at the same site.\u00a0 Companions on the journey range widely, from Ruskin, John Nash and William Cobbett \u2013 whose hatred of enclosure Deakin shares –\u00a0 to the engaging members of the rival Essex and Suffolk moth societies, each trying to lure the magnificent convolvulus hawk moth\u00a0 across the river Stour that divides them.<\/p>\n Back home in Suffolk from his travels<\/strong>, and the first tree he greets is a tall brooding Devonshire Quarrendon, grown from an apple pip taken from Ted Hughes\u2019 orchard;\u00a0 a reminder of Deakin\u2019s campaign with the Common Ground pressure-group he founded for a greater variety of English apple to be grown in the face of supermarket homogenisation.\u00a0 One particularly unruly variety he approvingly christens \u2018Tesco\u2019s Despair\u2019 for its stubborn refusal to grow to a uniform size and shape.<\/p>\n At one point Deakin notices how some insects are drawn to the brightness of a book he is reading, the reflected sunlight luring pearl-bordered fritillaries, dragonflies and damselflies. Many more have settled in these pages, from dark spinach moths to sticklebacks \u2013 and Wildwood<\/em> is also suffused with the soft cooing of wood-pigeons, the lyrical blackcaps and lesser whitethroats, the piping of robins and wrens, chiffchaff and the confident glissando of the chaffinch.<\/p>\n A man who lived most of his life with a pencil behind his ear, with which to measure his own joinery or to write \u2013 for whom a\u00a0 pencil was an \u2018intimate, elemental conjunction of graphite and wood, like a grey-marrowed bone\u2019 \u2013 Deakin was at ease with nature in a way that only a poacher with very deep pockets can be.\u00a0 It is fitting that his last book should be his masterpiece.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0(c) Hugh Thomson 2007<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Roger Deakin, Wildwood\u00a0 (Hamish Hamilton, \u00a320). \u00a0Reviewed for the Independent Greta Hopkinson was a visionary and neglected sculptress, born at the end of the 19th Century but having more in common with the current practice of Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. She lived in the New Forest that meant so much to Roger Deakin, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":616,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"page-without-sidebar.php","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2515","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2515"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2515"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2547,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2515\/revisions\/2547"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"100_2143\"](\"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/100_2143.jpg\")
<\/a>At its centre is the oak, chestnut and ash-framed house Deakin re-built with his own hands close to Suffolk common-land \u2013 a house familiar from his previous book, Waterlog, <\/em>and from his Radio 4 series, a house which he informs us with characteristic erudition is eighteen feet wide because that is the average limit of the crossbeams a suitable oak can provide.<\/p>\n
\nThis is naturalist writing in the footsteps of Gilbert White or Geoffrey Grigson<\/strong> –\u00a0 not only in the rigour of its style but as part of a literary tradition comfortable with the interweaving of nature with art, history and a life lived outside the narrow confines of biology.\u00a0 Not for Deakin the completist lists of species pinned to the page like butterflies or moths;\u00a0 each phenomenon of nature is puzzled over, and sometimes left unresolved, more in the spirit of Renaissance enquiry than contemporary dogmatism.<\/p>\n<\/a>Near the end he describes a pollarded hornbeam near his home, shaped like a church bell into which he can swing himself to read.\u00a0 During a wind, the surrounding wood shelters itself;\u00a0 \u2018all you hear.. is a sound with the quality of a shingle seashore not far away\u2019.
\nSuch aquatic metaphors abound \u2013 the timber frame of the house \u2018sits lightly on the sea of shifting Suffolk clay like an upturned boat and rides the earth\u2019s constant movement\u2019 \u2013 and might be expected by readers of his previous book Waterlog<\/em>, which\u00a0 followed an engaging conceit<\/strong>:\u00a0 the idea that like Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer<\/em>, Deakin could breast his way across England by its pools and wilder inland waters.\u00a0 But while Waterlog<\/em> won him a devoted following, and one which was extended in his intimate radio series, the writing was not nearly as assured as here.<\/p>\n