Wildwood A Journey Through Trees

Review by Becky Emerson Carlberg

Roger was a fellow tree lover and woodlander. So much so he claimed sap ran through his veins as did wood in his family. His mother’s name was Wood and his father’s middle name was Greenwood. His great grandfather even owned a timber mill.

The only child grew up to be an environmentalist, documentary maker who covered a wide range of subjects (horse racing, rock music wild places in nature) and noted writer. His 1999 book “Waterlog” was about his crazy experiences as a native swimmer. Roger dove into fens, moats, lakes, canals, seas and other wild waters in Britain. As he swam through the UK, he was detained by an English water bailiff (customs officer), mistaken for a suicide and intercepted by the Coast Guard. “Waterlog” was followed posthumously by “Wildwood” in 2007 and “Notes from Walnut Tree Farm” in 2008. Roger finished writing “Wildwood” four months before he died from brain cancer in 2006.

Roger felt trees are larger-than-life barometers of the weather and changing seasons. They signal changes in the natural world. Trees connect us to the sky. British-American poet W H Auden wrote ‘A culture is no better than its woods.’ The enemies of woods are always the enemies of culture and humanity.

“Wildwood’” is divided into four parts: Roots, Sapwood, Driftwood and Heartwood. Roger begins and ends in Suffolk, East Anglia, the UK. His home, Walnut Tree Farm, was 25 miles from the North Sea. Roger first spotted the cottage chimney in 1969. The decomposing thatch roof was partially covered in sheets of metal. Surrounding the cottage were twelve acres of meadows, ponds, the 33 foot long, 20-foot-wide moat (which he later daily swam in), ash and maple trees, rampant ivy, and remnants of a walnut, greengage plum and apple orchard. Roger slowly brought the cottage back into shape using oak timber from a demolished barn. It took 323 beams, including those hidden in walls and rafters. Roger estimated 300 trees were felled to build the 400-year-old cottage.

During reconstruction Roger lived in the back of a Volkswagen van. When winter arrived, he slept beside the central fireplace warmed by its wood fire and two cats for company. In spring he moved upstairs to sleep under the stars while he repaired the open rafters. Roger Deakin relished being in contact with nature.

In Sapwood Part 2, Roger joins botanists as they explore the bluebell woods, spends a night in the moth woods watching and trying to identify moths that land on sheets lit by lamps, visits friends living simple lives in salvaged shelters made of natural products, and walks with his former school buddy (now entomologist) as they revisit their former haunts and woods in the New Forest. He drives in the sacred groves of Devon, and heads to Blaenau Ffestiniog in Wales to see David Nash and his works of art, many done by chainsaw. In 1977, Nash created his Ash Dome from 22 ash saplings planted in a ring. Nash has continually shaped and trained his trees into a dome, all the while doing drawings and studies of it. His Wooden Boulder was a work of art like no other. A great oak was chopped down in 1978. It took two years but Nash created twelve wood sculptures from the massive trunk. A giant oak ball, three feet in diameter, remained. Nash had planned to take it back to his studio and used the nearby creek to float it down. The boulder jammed in the creek. Nash decided to record its progress in photos and drawings for years. The boulder has a surprising end of sorts.

Driftwood, Part 3, carries Roger on several trips from the UK into France as he takes a swim in a river pool and hikes through old chestnut woods. The Spanish Pyrenees in autumn are beautiful. In Greece he experiences horse races and villages dominated by huge London Plane trees. The Ukrainian train whisks him through the countryside of rivers and forests. In Poland Roger takes paths through beech woods and mountains past silent villages to the small the village of Baligrod. He travels through the desert parts of central Australia with its enormous red gum trees, and ends up in Utopia, a remote Aboriginal community. Roger goes on a hunt for bush plums. Eventually he winds up in New South Wales.

Roger takes another trip to Kazakhstan, where apples originated, to Almaty and the Tien Shan Mountain range where the apples grow. All apples are Malus sieversii, but vary in size, shape and flavor. He pocketed several seeds of the wild apples as well as walnuts from his next visit to the Walnut Forests in Kyrgyzstan, on the ancient Silk Road. During late September and October, families camp in the woods of tall walnut trees 60 to 100 feet tall, their hands black from walnut stain. Sacks of walnuts are continually hauled to market. Roger enjoyed the warm hospitality, but the fact remains too many people now tromp through the Kyrgyz walnut forest, too many cows graze, too much timber and hay harvested are all severely disturbing forest renewal. Both the wild apple and walnut forests are shrinking rapidly under intense ecological stress.

Roger feels at home in these mountains even though the trees and plants are subtly different from those in England. The forester Davlet Mamachanov has identified 286 distinct varieties of walnut in the Ferghana Valley. For weeks Roger is immersed in walnuts, wild apples, cherry plums and the comradery of strangers turned friends. Often he is served green walnuts in a thick sweet syrup.

Heartwood, Part 4, and the return to Suffolk. Back home. How to trim and cut live trees to make a laid hedge, the techniques of coppicing and pollarding, and proper tools. He ends his story under his ash bower, a nod to David Nash’s Ash Dome. The double row of bent over ash trees form Gothic arches. The eight trees were planted 20 years ago and have been periodically grafted, pruned and shaped. Nearby a new folly of 3 ten-foot tall ashes are being trained to grow in a spiral corkscrew.

Roger Deakin was a true woodlander.