Into the Woods

A writer travels the world looking for links between humans and trees.

WILDWOOD

A Journey Through Trees

By Roger Deakin

Free Press. 391 pp. $26.95

In 1996, the late Roger Deakin, a British filmmaker and broadcaster, set out to swim through the British Isles to feel connected to the British landscape. For a year he traveled amphibiously (by breaststroke) in the sea, and in all rivers, streams, lochs, lakes, swimming pools and spas that he encountered. But he immersed himself in more than just H2O. Along the way, he wrote Waterlog, a travelogue and nature-study book, chronicling the inhabitants of the various waterways, from eels and pikes to peoples.

Deakin later put his roots down in Suffolk, where he continued his swimming almost daily in the moat surrounding the ancient timber-framed farmhouse that he purchased and renovated. He developed a strong attachment to his home, the surrounding country and its rural lifestyle. He saw his world intertwined in a history of relationships with wood and trees. In Wildwood, a meandering sort of book, he begins at his beloved Walnut Tree Farm and takes us on a quest through Britain, eastern Europe, central Asia and central Australia to explore humanity's connections with wood "as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and in our lives."

One of the first stops is a rookery of crows where he camped in a tent to observe the birds waking at dawn. We join him later with a group of mothers -- moth-catchers -- at an electric light where rare specimens that alight at night are caught, identified and then released like prize trout. (In this jaunt, as with many others in the book, Deakin leaves it to the reader to figure out what this has to do with trees.) He then travels to Tumbling Bay Island in the Thames river, where a hamlet of "woodlanders" -- a community of people living a low-impact life in make-shift shelters -- demonstrates that "there is another way to live, on terms of greater intimacy with the woods and land." That way of life is "slower, more deliberate and benign."

Trees provide the shelter for all the thousands of plants and creatures that enchant the woodlanders, and they also give practical sustenance to other people. Deakin documents the various special properties of willows, oak, walnut and ash and the uses of these woods through the ages. Even as he champions natural woodlands as an ecological web, he never leaves people out. His view extends back to the Celtic tribe that the Romans called the Dumnonii, who refused to accept Roman rule and sought refuge in the forest. Trees and wood have long connected the people in England to the land. Before the famous Stonehenge was built, there were timber henges; recently discovered circles of postholes (some up to three feet in diameter) near Stonehenge date back to shortly after the glaciers left Scotland, 6,000 years ago.

Having reached back in time, Deakin travels out to the larger continent of Europe and beyond, where the connections to wood at times seem contrived, but interesting nevertheless. We suddenly find him, for example, in the Bieszczady Mountains in Poland with Annette, a mysterious companion. She is there to retrace her father's footsteps back to the night in 1939 when he barely escaped Russian patrols who fired on him as he crossed a frozen river into Poland. "The cruelty of the war was so massively traumatic" in that corner of Poland, writes Deakin, that "it feels as though it had all happened last week, and one might soon come across the still-smoking ruins of a village . . . a palpable atmosphere of terror permeates this land like soaked blood." The most visible evidence of the blood is botanical. Deakin notes the patches of "willowherb," or fireweed, where the ashes of wooden houses had permeated the ground and "splendid old apple trees, grown twisted and unpruned for years."

This book contains nuggets of wood lore beyond its obvious uses for food, animal fodder and building material. Wood also can serve as a calendar, for instance. A Neolithic walkway over a mile of what was once a flooded peat bog in Britain was made of oak planks supported by poles of ash, oak and lime. There are no written records of the walkway or the people who built it, but its history is inscribed in the pattern of growth rings of the fresh-cut wood, which tell us that it was built in the spring of 3807 or 3806 B.C.

The discursiveness of this book comes naturally. Deakin often wrote with a pencil because, he says, "It suits my tentative nature. . . . It is comforting and liberating to know that you can always rub out what is pencilled." Much of his writing reflects that fresh and tentative spirit. But one might have expected, and wanted, more "rubbing out."

Deakin died of a brain tumor in 2006, shortly after he finished this book. He understood the importance of forests in the ecology of the world and had a keen appreciation for what they were and might be again someday. Plus, he proved to be a congenial traveling companion in an invigorating romp. ·

Bernd Heinrich is the author of "The Trees in my Forest."