WILDWOOD:

A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin (Hamish Hamilton, £20) reviewed by Tony Davies. Available from Tree News Book Shop at £18, with Free P + P
Roger Deakin begins his last work with a loving description of his painstaking restoration of a ruined Suffolk farmhouse. As he talks of bivouacking among pigeons, bats and insects, while working green oak into a sturdy frame, he explains local growing conditions determine the scale of older homes. These ‘tend to be about eighteen feet wide because that is about the average limit of the straight run of a trunk of a youngish oak suitable in girth for making a major cross beam eight inches by seven.’ He then totals the major beams in the farm at 323: ‘So some 300 trees were felled to build this house: a small wood.’   
       
If this sounds prosaic, it is unfair. Much of the writing is positively poetic. For example, the Green Man who pops up throughout British folklore (and much church architecture) is ‘the spirit of the rebirth of nature. He is the chucked pebble that ripples out into every tree ring. He is the green outlaw and he is everywhere, like a Che Guavara poster.’

Tony Davies is a smallholder and local tree warden in his native Cumbria.
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