Customer Reviews

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Deakin's essays on his experiences, since he was a young student, in various woods in his native Great Britain and in numerous other parts of the world among the most eloquent, inspiring, and entertaining natural history essays that I have read. He combines his interest in natural history, myth and legend, the environment, and above all his interactions, and those of others, with wooded areas. This book is not to be missed.

When I first read an advance review of this book, I knew I had to have it.
I'm not a a tree specialist, just a tree-lover. This informative book is written for folks like me.
It presents a world-wide perspective of cultural relationships, history and some specific species data.
What I loved most is that the author's prose style. This book is so well-written that it carries you along until the last page. I will definitely re-read it several times in the future!

My husband said, "Read this book,you will love it." He could not have been more right. I do not know when I have read a book I loved more than this journey around the world of trees. Having grown up in the Midwest, in a little Iowa town full of maple trees and river bottoms, I was so at home in this book I cried when I read the last page. I travel in Britain, particularly Wales, when I can, and have been in some of the ancient groves. I once walked a footpath through the woods near Stackpole, and got so thoroughly lost that when I emerged on a road hours later, it was a terrible shock. I had been in the world of trees. Deakin took me back to that place so thoroughly, that one night at about 3:00 I stopped reading and was surprised to find myself on my couch in front of the fire, I had been so immersed in the walnut trees of Kyrgystan. Roger Deakin is no longer on this earth, but these works of his will endure in the genre of nature writing forever.

Won't someone please, perhaps his friend Robert MacFarlane, go through Deakins papers so this book won't have to be his last?
Another excellent book going undeservedly undernoticed and unsung. Believe it or not one of the best chapters is "Among Jaguars"-a chapter on automobiles in a book about trees; I squeal with delight! Find out a great deal about cricket bats and eel traps, and the Green Man, among other fascinating things.
Squeezing himself inside a hollow thousand year old holly, full of holes and decay: "Yet the tree was in full foliage and blackbirds were sampling the first of its ripe pink berries."
A book to be savored...

The English author of this book is Roger Deakin. This is a book not only about English trees but also about the author's traveling the world over and meeting with people, artisans and those who know and value what trees do for us. It is out of print, unfortunately, and should be reprinted for coming generations for it is a well-written and lively book descriptive of people and places.

In the very early goings of this book (p.9), author Deakin, in describing the "bothy" that his father built for him as a lad when he was about six, writes: "Thoreau would have approved of the name we gave it: `Cosy Cabin' emblazoned on a tin sign above the door." Would he have indeed? Readers familiar with Thoreau know that there is nothing at all "cosy" about him and his writing. Sorry, but Deakin is not anywhere near a modern Thoreau, more like an anti-Thoreau in point of fact - despite "professional" reviewers claims to the contrary and the fact that Thoreau is the writer whose name is most often invoked by Deakin. Thoreau was a misanthrope. Deakin loves company. Deakin delights in the wild, open spaces - once he departs England where - to be blunt - they don't exist. Thoreau spent a night in gaol because, in part, of his objection to The Mexican War and proffers a deep, meditation on that institution in "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." Deakin visits a woodworking family and watches the Iraq war on the telly. But the essential difference, why Walden is great literature and Wildwood is not, is that Walden is filled with deep introspective insights that resonate with any poetic reader, whether he or she lives in town or country. Wildwood is stuffed with very interesting information: about trees and old customs and folkways of all sorts, woodworking, moths, walnuts, the "ur-apple," and on and on. At the end of Walden, the similarly attuned reader feels he knows Thoreau's heart and soul. At the end of Wildwood, I don't feel I know anything about Deakin at all, except that he liked trees and liked to hang around with people who liked trees as well.

There are some worthwhile things here: "The Moth Wood" chapter is surely the most entrancing of the book. But, essentially, this book is best described as a chummy eco-tour of certain places and their flora and fauna. If this is all you wish from the book, it will not disappoint. If you're searching for something more profound, keep searching or perhaps re-read Walden; though from the few reviews here, I have a suspicion that none of the readers have read Walden in the first place.

The last lines from Robert Frost's poem, "A Tree at My Window" kept recurring to me whilst reading this rambling account:

"That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather."

Deakin's head is very much concerned with outer weather.

As a voracious reader of so many American nature writers I feel a need to comment on how I didn't find this book to be akin to Thoreau or Wendell Berry as suggested by other reviewers. The most accurate way I can find to describe the difference between this book and those of say, Muir, or Leopold, is that Deakin is writing of a 'wild' that is so shaped by England's past, almost every tree and other living thing he references is described in a way that connects it to a history of human use. As an extensive traveler of the wild places of America, it strikes me as though he was writing of a small nature preserve in, perhaps, New Jersey, where there are all sorts of wild animals and plants still striving and thriving for sure, but where you are always brought back to the encroachments of the suburbs around you. Clearly, many other people are loving this book, but I haven't, and I think it's because I was expecting it to be as wild as Muir's "The Mountains of California" or as integrated and articulate as Berry's "The Gift of Good Land" and in my opinion it was neither.