Periods, too, when his absence has felt oddly accommodating, like a flattened patch of undergrowth made comfortable by turning and turning about. Just across the garden from the summer kitchen is the sauna, another half-cob, half-wooden shed, heated by a wood-stove with a water tank perched above it. When he died of a sudden illness in 2007, aged 63, he had written just two books: Waterlog, which set off the wild swimming craze, and the even more influential Wildwood, which helped kickstart the publishing phenomenon of nature writing.

Ash trees - Fraxinus excelsior - Ash tree identification Ash trees - Fraxinus excelsior - Ash tree identification

After rattling across several miles of this high savannah we pull up before a mound of wooden beehives, an old Mercedes van and a curvaceous, wood-framed caravan sheathed in sheet steel that could have come straight out of La Strada. The film stated that he was the source for the voice of the swimmer in Alice Oswald's 48-page poem Dart, about the River Dart in Devon. The sociable outsider with a hectic, corvid intelligence; a compulsive, impulsive collector of objects, phrases and loves; someone who leaned hard into late-blooming celebrity but who was only really at ease in the water or at home. Letters arrive from around the world: readers who have encountered his work, and been powerfully changed by it.

Our sticky mouths and fingers stained orange and purple, we dip and thread our way through the fruit forest. This is not unwelcome – in any love there is that moment when the object of our admiration is revealed to be not wholly who we thought. 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 ou The walls are mostly ochre and the doors and windows bright blue, and all have orchard gardens bursting with lush, fruiting trees, mostly apples and pears but also apricots and walnuts. Juniper believed that just one or possibly two of these ‘bird apple’ seeds was lifted over the rising hills to the Tien Shan and the valley of the Ili River, most likely in the crop or faeces of a migrating bird.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (Audio Download): Roger

By the time the Romans introduced the domestic apple to Britain, they had learnt the secret of grafting. File RD/TW/5/1/7, for instance, contains entries for: "Calvados; bristlecone pines; dachas; diving; jungle boys and land girls; pixies; protestors; skylarks; timber frame houses" – along with about 70 others: a zany haberdashery of Roger's interests. Mr Tree was particularly active in the leafy district of the city known as Kompot, which means ‘fruit salad’, and it was probably Baum’s idea that every street there should be named after a fruit tree.I’ve visited Walnut Tree Farm, kept much as it was by the new owners, swum in the moat Deakin reinstated and walked the ancient green lane saved by his campaigning energy. In our narrow Bayswater kitchen was earthenware trove he had found in southern Spain, from Antonio Sala's kiln in a village near Gerona in Catalonia. Isa speaks little English and I feel ashamed of my small Russian and no Kazakh, but we find we can converse quite happily through Luisa, or in the botanical Latin of the names of trees and plants. It took me years to find it, but tucked away in a paragraph of “East to Eden” was a sentence that would grow through my own life in ways which are still surprising me now, more than a dozen years on. Niagara has always been a place of extreme contrasts, where the sublime and magnificent cozies up to the tawdry and brutal.

Wildwood By Roger Deakin | Used | 9780141010014 | World of Books Wildwood By Roger Deakin | Used | 9780141010014 | World of Books

Out on the steppe, huge herds of wild horses and donkeys also browsed on the ripe apples and helped them spread westwards and south along the range towards what is now Almaty. When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is – water – and it begins to move with the water around it. He is the author of Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, compiled posthumously from his diaries.Then the tender cheeks for the women, and the eyes for the two most senior foresters, to help keep them watchful for approaching dangers.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees - Roger Deakin - Google Books Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees - Roger Deakin - Google Books

Like the bears, they kept on selecting the larger, juicier, sweeter apples, so that as it spread west, the apple gradually became larger. The ash tree is also one of our most ancient trees, they can live up to 400 years old and have appeared in pollen records and ancient mythologies for centuries. Wildwood is about the element wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and our lives. Towards the end of last year, he and I exchanged e-mails about the changes we were noticing at either end of the planet - in Suffolk and in Sydney.

Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker, Suffolk critic and novelist, co-edited a collection of writing taken from Deakin's personal notebooks, largely focused on the wildlife and ecology of the area around his farmhouse.