Wildwood
A Journey Through Trees
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A much-loved classic of nature writing from environmentalist and the author of Waterlog, Roger Deakin, Wildwood is an exploration of the element wood in nature, our culture and our lives.
'Breathtaking, vividly written . . . reading Wildwood is an elegiac experience' Sunday Times
'He writes nature as a blackbird sings, or a bird of prey rides thermals - effortlessly.' Reader Review
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From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, he embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with wood and trees.
Meeting woodlanders of all kinds, he lives in shacks and cabins, travels in search of the wild apple groves of Kazakhstan, goes coppicing in Suffolk, swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc, and hunts bush plums with Aboriginal women in the outback.
Perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Colin Tudge, Roger Deakin's unmatched exploration of our relationship with trees is autobiography, history, traveller's tale and incisive work in natural history. It will take you into the heart of the woods, where we go 'to grow, learn and change.
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'Enthralling' Will Self, New Statesman
'Extraordinary . . . some of the finest naturalist writing for many years' Independent
'An excellent read - lyrical and literate and full of social and historical insights of all kinds' Colin Tudge, Financial Times
'Enchanting, very funny, every page carries a fascinating nugget. Should serve to make us appreciate more keenly all that we have here on earth . . . one of the greatest of all nature writers' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this last book before his death in 2006, Deakin (Waterlog) delights with his curiosity and affection for rambling forests in Europe and Australia. The book is as much about the woodland animals and humans engaged with forest life as it is about the trees, the rooks "flinging themselves into a strong wind and somersaulting wildly upward, then diving straight down again into the woods like bungee jumpers"; the Essex Moth Group clustering around a mercury lamp to view moths with poetic names like "the willow beauty, the dingy footman, the clouded silver"; and artists engaging with nature, like John Wolseley, inspired by the fire-struck Australian Whipstick Forest to create works expressing "all the urgency and energy of the racing bushfire itself." Deakin's lyrical, sometimes anthropomorphic portraits of trees and wood are saturated with his scientific knowledge and passion: a hazel branch, "more of a magician's staff than a walking stick... naturally fluted and spiraled by the strangling effect of the honeysuckle stem that still encircled it like an asp... was a masterpiece of nature, the voluptuous embrace of the honeysuckle exciting the hazel into a frenzy of cell division."
