Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

Here published for the first time in the United States is the last book by Roger Deakin famed British nature writer and icon of the environmentalist movement. In Deakins glorious meditation on wood the "fifth element" -- as it exists in nature in our culture and in our souls -- the reader accompanies Deakin through the woods of Britain Europe Kazakhstan and Australia in search of what lies behind mans profound and enduring connection with trees. Deakin lives in forest shacks goes "coppicing" in Suffolk swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc and hunts bushplums with Aboriginal women in the outback. Along the way he ferrets out the mysteries of woods detailing the life stories of the timber beams composing his Elizabethan house and searching for the origin of the apple. As the worlds forests are whittled away Deakins sparkling prose evokes woodlands anarchic with life rendering each tree as an individual living being. At once a travelers tale and a splendid work of natural history Wildwood reveals amid the worlds marvelous diversity that which is universal in human experience.