Child of the New Forest

Roger Deakin was a swimmer, old-fashioned socialist, carpenter, broadcaster, tree-planter, chair-bodger, ‘quasi-hippie’, art critic, naturalist, Cambridge graduate, traveller, north-east Suffolk man, champion of local individuality, anti-globaliser and explorer of the links between nature and culture. (Guess how many of these attributes he shared with this reviewer.) He founded Common Ground, the organisation that gave the only sensible advice — do nothing — about what to do after the Great Storm 20 years ago. He died last year leaving this, his last work.

It is not a book about wildwood, in the proper sense of woodland in the dim and distant past before the coming of settled humanity. Much of it is not even a book about trees. It is a miscellany of rural essays, in the literary tradition of W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies and the author’s beloved William Cobbett.

While a schoolboy Deakin had the good fortune to fall in with an enthusiastic teacher of fieldwork, Barry Goater, who introduced him to serious learning of plants and animals on camping expeditions in the New Forest.