T.C. Smout writes:

Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, edited from a manuscript completed before the author’s death last year, is an idiosyncratic delight. It is meditation and description, nature writing and travel writing, rooted in his Suffolk home but with excursions elsewhere in southern England as well as to Australia, Europe and the lands of the former USSR. The title, though, is a misnomer, since the woods with which he is concerned are often not wild but populated, important because of what they mean to people and culture rather than being untouched and primeval.

(LRB 29 November 2007)

Starting from Walnut Tree Farm, the Suffolk home that he rebuilt himself, Roger Deakin set out across the world to map the importance of trees and forests in human culture, history and literature. The resulting book, completed shortly before his death last year, is by turns passionate, whimsical, lyrical, despairing and inspiring. Whether coppicing his own trees in Suffolk, swimming underneath the walnut trees of Haut-Languedoc or hunting for the wild apple groves of Kazakhstan, Deakin is a well-informed guide to the mysteries and mystique of woodland; this book is a fitting tribute to a great writer, and a sad reminder of a loss to literature.

Hamish Hamilton | hardback 391 pp. |ISBN: 9780241141847