Earth tones and a human scale – Book Review

Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey through Trees (London: Penguin, 2008; first publ. 2007)

At first this might seem like nothing more than a jumbled collection of essays about trees.

There are chapters about walnut, elm, and fruit trees, of course. But Deakin is also interested in the flora and fauna of forest ecosystems, as well as people who make their living from wood: whether traditional woodland crafts like charcoal burning and thatching, or more twenty-first century activities like tree-art and experimental eco-living.

From these excursions into the woods, we learn about the history and preservation of different varieties of tree and fruit in the UK, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. Yet strangely it only becomes obvious that this is a ‘journey’ when Deakin’s focus finally returns to Suffolk, where he lives, at the end of the book.

There is clearly a structural problem here. Perhaps this book could have been organised around geographical areas: ‘Australia’, ‘Kazakhstan’, ‘The New Forest’, etc. However, this would have forced Deakin to write more sustained narratives, without the benefit of his little journalistic twists or slightly sentimental summaries at the end of each chapter. It might be argued that the present chaotic structure better reflects the organic nature of wild woods, yet Deakin is mainly interested in the interplay between the organic and the human. Order emerging through and delighting in chaos – this would have been a more appropriate structure for his book.

A related criticism is that Deakin manages – quite frustratingly – to be scientific about certain things and deeply unscientific about others. When it comes to Linnaean taxonomy or the evolutionary relationships between different sorts of Prunus, Deakin is right on the money. But there are subjects, such as accurate etymology and the detailed historical contexts of his subjects, about which he is not even curious.

The special strength of Deakin’s idiosyncratic approach is his love of nature in all its vibrant diversity. He works and inhabits his own patch of wood, and respects others who do the same. Deakin writes from within a ‘woodsy’ community, at once local to East Anglia and thoroughly international. ‘Alternative’ or ‘natural’ lifestyles, as Deakin experiences them, are highly appealing, not least because they leave room for individuality and working at a human scale and pace.

This approach verges in places on the gently political, as when he writes about ‘the pleasure, all too rare now in England, of eating food in its natural season and in its own place’ (p. 314), or sings the praises of a life freed from the Western tendency to commodify every thing and experience: ‘Their needs are immediate: food, the harvest work [...] air and exercise’ (p. 320).

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