A weekend of visits, family, friends and over indulgence.
I am sufficiently moved by the experience to declare a public holiday tomorrow. Get in quick you might enjoy it. So the link to walnut trees, see below, it kept me alive through the planning business!
My joy for the past few weeks has been a book by Roger Deakin published posthumously. I really enjoyed ‘Waterlog’ and decided to order ‘Wildwood’ from the Suffolk County Library Stakhanovites.
Page ix of the introduction states –
“It is through tress that we see and hear the wind……”
“…and the falling raindrops ripple out into every tree ring.”
Know a practitioner, learning by doing, someone who can set knowledge in language which captures the imagination.
The first section of the book gives a very strong sense of place, Suffolk. This is Deakin’s place of work, love and life. The naming of parts has never interested me. What we may forget, and others not know, is that there is such a joy to understanding, at whatever level. The skills of the hunter gatherer applied to knowledge bear fruit only after they have been assembled like an unruly flock of wild animals. Field trips to the New Forest with an inspired teacher probably lit the fires laid by Deakin’s home, family and its history. After this we pass through bluebell woods for a picnic and sleep under a rookery where, in the late watches of the night, he claims that the fledglings can be heard in the nests. There follows a minor discourse on the vocalisations of these birds. His conclusion is that for all the understated faint praise in literature for the sound of rooks the nearest approximation in human terms he can think of is ….
“If you found yourself across the fields from a Somerset pub, late at night, at cider pressing time you might hear something like a rookery.”
And so it goes. Cobbett is there of course, and easy references to Hughes and other native species. The Observer review by Tim Adams claims that his travels afield in Australia and Kyrgyzstan are less sure footed and result in less close observation than the native jaunts. I would defy anyone to read the idyll of Deakin’s perambulations in the walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan and not believe they had been granted a vision, in detail, of paradise. His view of the black hand gang is not without its appreciation of the fragility of eco systems and the difficulties they face.
So home to Suffolk which, strangely enough, is where we find ourselves. I do not feel I have to know trees as individuals, or to hug them, they will get along just fine without me. However, I have been inspired by this book. It’s a great pity he never got round to seeing the forests of Cedrus Libani. He might have thought they would be worth a word or two.
