Category Archives: Love of Nature

Book Review, Conservation, Love of Nature

Book Review: Feral by George Monbiot

Feral by George Monbiot
Feral by George Monbiot

Well, what a terrifically interesting book. I’ll say at once that while I’m right up there with Monbiot’s dream of a well-rewilded landscape (with a bit of wildwood near you for peace and refreshment from the electronic world), Monbiot is so bold in his arguments that it’s impossible to agree with everything he writes.

The starting point for this book is that we all feel the need to be free of our society’s stifling artificiality. We quietly hate being stuck on commuter trains, boxed into offices, jammed onto pavements, trapped in front of screens, permanently at the beck and call of electronic devices and social media. Monbiot is very funny on this sad topic. He uses as evidence not all this stuff from today’s world – you know it already – but the results when people from our world have gone into tribal societies: they uniformly want to stay. Conversely, when tribespeople have visited our world, they always want to go back home. Wild, 1. Civilised, 0.

Remnant Bluebells on Ramsey Island: once this bare moorland was forest
Remnant Bluebells on Ramsey Island, Pembrokeshire: once this bare moorland was forest. Photo: Ian Alexander

Monbiot moves to Wales, near the bare open heathery uplands of the Cambrian Mountains, that everybody tells him are beautiful. He finds what every hillwalker (myself included) must have noticed without thinking too much of it, that there are very few species up there: few flowers (save Tormentil, a marker of overgrazing as sheep won’t eat it), few insects, few birds.

“I hate sheep”, writes Monbiot, startlingly: no echoes of Wainwright here, no grudging admiration of those toughest of hillwalkers, the mountain sheep like the Herdwicks of Lakeland. He hates the bare sward, devoid of trees. Trees? On the mountains? Yes, he shows us the record from pollen cores: from the end of the last ice age, the Welsh uplands were covered in forest – hazel, oak, alder, willow, pine and birch. “By 4,500 years ago, trees produced over 70 per cent of the pollen in the sample.” Then, Neolithic farmers cleared the wildwood, and by 1,300 years ago the trees had gone, replaced by heather. And domestic animals, sheep and cattle, replaced the great beasts of the forest: the elk, bear, wolf, wild boar, lynx, wolverine. Even the mild beaver was driven to extinction.

Just proposing to rewild the British Uplands would be controversial enough, though the process has begun with many small schemes and a few large ones – Trees For Life’s vast Caledonian Forest project notable among them, with (at its core) the 40 square kilometres of the Dundreggan estate becoming bushier by the year. Proposing the reintroduction – the release into the wild, not yet legal in Britain – of beaver and boar and elk and lynx is more dramatic still. But Monbiot would like the large predators, too. Gulp.

And he goes further. We are all guilty of “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” (let’s call it SBS for short, it sounds a horrible disease). We imagine the world should be as we recall it from our own childhood. But it was already depauperate then!

Monbiot would like to allow nature to rebuild itself, with a little help to get started where necessary. He observes a remarkable fact that again we hadn’t thought much of: if you cut a tree, or lay a hedge of hawthorn, hazel, oak, willow – it sprouts vigorously up from the broken trunk, the cut stumps, the splintered branches. Why did our native trees evolve those responses? Because, argues Monbiot, they are adapted to large herbivores. Really large herbivores: elephants, rhinoceroses. Oh my. He wants to bring those back too. Actually it was the straight-tusked elephant we used to have: and the woolly rhino, both extinct: but Monbiot suggests that the living species are good and close replacements. Clearly, getting the relevant permissions might take a little time.

These are just some of the big, meaty ideas in Feral. There are sacred cows in there: the conservation authorities value the bare uplands, and certainly they have a beauty, manmade or not. The story is powerfully told, enlivened and illustrated by tales of wild (and dangerous) personal adventures. Monbiot knows his ecology and his landscapes: he just interprets them differently from the establishment. Quite often, as with his descriptions of the disgraceful overfishing practised by Britain and the European Union, he is certainly right. At other times he is controversial, even combative, but always fascinating. Whether you agree or disagree, if you’re interested in nature – as I assume you are, given that you’re here – you need to read Feral.

Buy it from Amazon.com  (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Read the blog post:  “Meeting George Monbiot“

Love of Nature

Old English Love of Nature

Today, since I was passing by, I dropped in to the British Museum’s new gallery celebrating Anglo-Saxon (or, if you prefer, Old English) culture and art. To anyone who thinks Saxon just means crude and rough, dull Dark Ages stuff, think again. The new gallery, Room 41 (upstairs, almost above the main entrance) is resplendent with finely-crafted treasures. The most famous among them are from the Sutton Hoo ship burial of some real-life Beowulf-like leader. And one of the finest of the pieces from that collection is the carved gilt helmet.

Sutton Hoo Helmet, with protective animals
Restoration of Sutton Hoo Helmet, with protective animals

At first glance, the carvings on the helmet seem to be restricted to the panels, which show warriors with swords, on foot or on horseback, along with elaborate ‘Celtic’ patterns of knotwork. That would be fine enough, but there is more. The nose and eyebrow guards of the helmet, together with the moustache, form a large winged animal with angry red inset garnets for its eyes, fiery red rectangular garnets bordering its wings. It touches nose-to-nose with a snake or dragon – the old word for both was ‘worm’ – that stretches as a crest over the top of the helmet. The worm’s eyes too are of garnets. And even better, the ends of the eyebrow/wings are shining gold boar’s heads, just like the boar-headed helmet mentioned in the Beowulf poem.

So this marvellous helmet, this treasure almost beyond price (both now and when it was a prince’s armour and emblem), is adorned, no, actually made of no less than three powerful beasts, each perhaps with almost magical powers: flight, fire, and ferocity, we might say. It isn’t hard to imagine that these were talismanic animals, symbols of warrior bravery, strength and victory in battle. Were they spirit guides, protective animals chosen or sent to guard the wearer from harm? I should think so.

So, what was the Old English feeling towards animals? Certainly they were taken for food; but on the evidence of this splendid piece of royal armour, they were surely also admired for their strength, speed, and courage. Can we describe that as love of nature? Of course we can.

One final question: how long have the English loved nature? We may guess the date: since the foundation of our kingdom by Hengist and Horsa in c. 550 AD, it seems. Both of our founder-kings (they ruled together) had animal names: Hengist means stallion, while Horsa (you guessed it) means horse. Not too hard to imagine which fine strong proud animal their parents specially admired, then.

Environment, Love of Nature, Natural History

Dordogne: From Ticklist to Friends (26 July 2014)

When I first acquired a macro lens for my camera, I raced about the meadows, photographing every insect I could: and many of them were species new to me, though I must have seen them flying past (or away) many times. For the close-up lens and detailed images gave me something I had never had: the ability to study shy insects as if I had caught them and pinned them to a Victorian collector’s card. Suddenly those speckled orange butterflies resolved themselves into Spotted Fritillaries, or for that matter Glanville, Queen of Spain, Silver-Washed, Small Pearl-Bordered and High Brown Fritillaries. It was a revelation, and a delight.

It was also sobering: in all my journeys around the British Isles, the only Fritillary I ever saw was a Small Pearl-Bordered, and that was on the north coast of Cornwall, only a few miles from Land’s End, as if almost the whole of Britain had been scrubbed clean of butterflies, but a few remote corners with the last few surviving individuals had somehow been overlooked.

But as far as rural France was concerned, once up in the wooded hills with their mosaic of old coppiced woodland, little meadows, fruit trees and ponds around old tumbledown farms and barns, or out on such steep chalk grassland hillsides as remain, the butterflies, beetles and wild flowers remained much as they must have been a century ago. I clicked away and framed a postcard-sized print of each species, 8 to a clipframe, and returned each day to the meadows to photograph more.

 

Lady Orchid in Dordogne
Lady Orchid in Dordogne

It was the same with the flowers, especially on the chalk, as soon as I finally managed to get down here in springtime to see the orchids, rather than in high summer to see dry brown grass (and perhaps burnt-out orchid seed-heads, the colour of well-cooked toast). Everywhere there were Pyramidal Orchids and Chalk Fragrant Orchids, so numerous as to have a wealth of variation in size, shape and height, evidently frequently hybridizing. In damper places were Early Purple Orchids; and here and there were species I had never seen in Britain – Lizard, Military, Lady, Green-Winged, Fly, and Butterfly Orchids. They all went on the wall, printed as close-ups.

A green longhorn beetle with black spots
A green longhorn beetle with black spots: I’m delighted to learn from the Romanian Longhorn Project that it’s Saperda punctata (Linnaeus, 1767)

As for the beetles, the only really large species that I’d seen at all frequently in England was the Stag Beetle. Here, I photographed at least 8 species of Longhorn, from the mighty Tanner to two kinds of wasp-coloured beetle (Clytus and Strangalia) and a magnificent green kind with black spots, Saperda punctata. The Romanian Longhorn Project kindly identified it from the photo, saying that it is protected in Central Europe: such splendid insects are becoming rare, and not only in England.

Waspish beetle: Strangalia maculata on Mint
Waspish beetle: Strangalia maculata on Mint

Yet perhaps it was really the wasps that caught my eye and stole my heart. Yes, wasps. As well as ordinary-sized social wasps, the area was home to great spherical nests of the European (Red) Hornet and the new, darker, slimmer and far more aggressive Asiatic Hornet. And besides those were Sphecid or Digger Wasps of many kinds, all solitary and often handsome; Ichneumons with narrow waists and enormously long ovipositors like overgrown stings (though wasp stings are actually modified ovipositors, so only females have them); and marvellously beautiful and imposing Potter Wasps with black and yellow legs and long slender yellow waists. These are shy and wary of large animals, so photographing them was always a challenge: but eventually I managed it.

Now, as the years go by, I find I recognize these insects not only by their size and shape and patterns, but by their habits of flight, the kind of weather that brings them out, which plants they like to visit, where they nest. In short, they have become familiar: and with familiarity has come a comfortable feeling of friendship and of being at home, of things being in their right places. The excitement of the new has been replaced by the appreciation of this particular ecosystem, where ‘eco’ means what its Greek etymology implies: οικος (oikos), house: this is my and their home, the place where we live together.

 

Book Review, Love of Nature, Wetlands, Wildlife

Book Review: The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

The Snow Geese by William Fiennes (2002)
The Snow Geese by William Fiennes (2002)

A young Englishman has been very ill, has spent a long time in hospital, has had the joy of life knocked out of him, is lonely, disorientated. He is brought home by his parents, to the old ironstone house that he loves, in the fields whose names and shapes he knows. Slowly he regains his strength. He reads Paul Gallico’s old tale, The Snow Goose  (illustrated by Peter Scott, founder of the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust; Peter Scott Books, 1946).

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

He decides to go to America to follow the real Snow Geese all the way from Eagle Lake, Texas to the Foxe Peninsula, Baffin Island, three thousand miles on their spring migration.

Here we are in Texas:

“The first sign was a faint tinkling in the distance, from no particular direction, the sound of a marina, of halliards flicking on metal masts. Drifts of specks appeared above the horizon ring. Every speck became a goose. Flocks were converging on the pond from every compass point, a diaspora in reverse, snow geese flying in loose Vs and Ws and long skeins that wavered like seaweed strands, each bird intent on the roost at the centre of the horizon’s circumference. Lines of geese broke up and then recombined in freehand ideograms: kites, chevrons, harpoons. I didn’t move. I just kept watching the geese, the halliard yammer growing louder and louder, until suddenly flocks were flying overhead, low over the shoulder, the snow geese yapping like small dogs, crews of terriers or dachshunds – urgent sharp yaps in the the thrum and riffle of beating wings and the pitter-patter of goose droppings pelting down around me. They approached the roost on shallow glides, arching their wings and holding them steady, or flew until they were right above the pond and then tumbled straight down on the perpendicular. …”

Fiennes writes with glittering perfection: this is a book of rare beauty, taut as a fairytale, a journey back to joy in life, a story of homesickness and longing, of loneliness and company, of the generosity of strangers, of Greyhound bus journeys, and days and nights in a tiny ‘roomette’ in a Canadian sleeper train, of long periods of waiting in small towns and hotel rooms, of wildlife and landscapes, of snow geese themselves, and, marvellously simply, of returning home.

This is a special book that can be read as literature or as narrative natural history. Either way, it’s a marvellous read. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Conservation, Environment, Love of Nature, Nature Reserves

Aah, it’s Duckling Time

Mute Swans with Cygnets
Mute Swans with Cygnets

Aah. Ducks with ducklings. Coots with Cootlings. Geese with Goslings. Swans with Cygnets. Moorhens with … chicks. Whatever the charmingly mediaeval diminutive nouns, it was a day for walking around the London Wetland Centre, enjoying the ‘sunny spells’ and the bright display of wild flowers, artfully seeded, and delighting in Mother Nature’s ability to conjure up fluffy sentimental feelings about roughly duck-shaped balls of fluffy down feathers.

Coot with Cootling
Coot with Cootling

I’d gone alone to see if there were any interesting dragonflies, but there weren’t many about: a warmer day is always better. But there was a Black-Tailed Skimmer basking on one of the ‘wildside’ paths.

Black-Tailed Skimmer
Black-Tailed Skimmer

Apart from that, I glimpsed one Hawker dragonfly – probably a Hairy dragonfly, as the only kind other than the Emperor seen there in the past month; and there were plenty of Common Blue and Bluetail damselflies about.

As for butterflies, it was alarmingly empty: a couple of meadow browns, a small white or two, and a female brimstone the highlight. My alarm at the lack of insects in general in England is growing. If it’s neonicotinoids – hot on the heels of all the earlier insecticides, many now rightly banned for their destructive side-effects on wildlife – then we are watching a manmade calamity. The BBC noted that some ditch water was toxic enough to be used, just as it was, as an insecticide spray for crops. The effect of that on dragonflies can only be imagined: a sad thing, as (living in rivers and ponds rather than on farmland) they have to some degree escaped the disaster that has all but eliminated our farmland birds, bees and butterflies.

But on a dead tree, wildside, was another fluffy-duckling sight, this time from a distinctly arboreal bird.

Parent and juvenile Green Woodpecker
Parent and juvenile Green Woodpecker

Two Green Woodpeckers, presumably a parent and a newly-fledged juvenile, were clinging to a dead tree, the parent a little higher up, the youngster apparently begging for food with open beak. The family drama went on for several minutes.

Two different Hoverflies on Burnet
Two different Hoverflies on Burnet

Tiny wildlife shows were visible on the flowers: here, two hoverflies of different species, busy being Batesian mimics of dangerously stinging wasps (but harmless as doves) are feeding, slow and relaxed in the sunshine, on the small flowers in a Great Burnet’s flowerhead. They didn’t seem at all bothered by each other, or by any risk from predators. But despite their glorious colours, it was duckling day today.

Conservation, Love of Nature, Natural History, Natural Patterns, Nature Reserves

Of Hoverflies and Bush Crickets

Large hoverfly in dark woodland space
Large hoverfly in dark woodland space

An English Summer is, as the saying goes, three fine days and a thunderstorm. Or, going out with sunhat, suncream, sunglasses… and a pullover and raincoat, just in case. Today it started out cold with a chill north-north-easterly wind, but quietened down and became rather too hot to work comfortably.

A tree had fallen across the glade in the Gunnersbury Triangle where the beekeeper is going to station one of her hives. I soon threw off my pullover, and my rainproof jacket never left my rucksack. The soft willow wood was no trouble to saw up, and I dragged the branches to the dead-hedge without much effort. A lot of small holm oak, an invasive alien species from the Mediterranean (think Ligurian coast) has sprung up from old stumps, so they joined the pile.  A Blackcap sang to me while I worked.

The butterfly transect revealed very little, though some Commas are encouragingly laying eggs. As for other insects, several species of hoverfly, from tiny and slender to large wasp mimics and a fine one largely black, perhaps a bee mimic, were active. They hover, perch and sunbathe, or dash and chase each other (specially the large black ones) aggressively. I had fun trying to photograph one actually in the air, you can see the atmospheric but not very useful result above. It does give something of an idea how much they whiz and dash about, hovering always on the qui vive.

Ragwort is getting more and more abundant on the reserve; today, Helen spotted some tiny (probably first instar) Cinnabar Moth caterpillars on one of the plants; an adult visited me while I worked.

The Peacock Butterfly caterpillars of last week seem all to have pupated in hiding somewhere; there are quite a few younger ones still on the stinging nettles, so there will be at least two lots of adults.

Knot Grass caterpillar on bramble
Knot Grass caterpillar on bramble

We found a Knot Grass moth caterpillar (a Noctuid moth) on a bramble. It is hairy and aposematic, with brown hair but without the four long brown ‘shaving brush’ tufts of the Vapourer moth caterpillar (a Lymantriid or Tussock moth), which we’ve also found here.

But perhaps the insect I was happiest to see was this young Bush Cricket, resting on a flower for no particular reason, and taking a risk as its fine spotted green camouflage was totally compromised by its white and yellow flowery background. It must be the first one I’ve seen this year.

Young Bush Cricket
Young Bush Cricket

I have always loved natural patterns. The bark of this Aspen tree looks almost as if it encodes symbols in some cuneiform notation.

Natural Pattern: Aspen bark, almost seeming like a form of writing
Natural Pattern: Aspen bark, almost seeming like a form of writing
Love of Nature, Natural History, Nature Reserves, Talks

Camouflage Talk, Camouflaged Cakes

Today I gave my ‘Camouflage without Spots’ talk at Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve. It was very hot, and having helped the RSPB local group set up their stall at the Bedford Park Festival on the common, I cooled off and picked up the materials for the talk.

Amazing Camouflaged Cakes
Amazing Camouflaged Cakes

Helen had set out the tables and baked some amazing Camouflage Cakes – someone joked they couldn’t see them – and we all had lemonade in the heat.

2 legs good, 4 legs better
2 legs good, 4 legs better: Tadpole Metamorphosis before our eyes

Once I had run through the talk and arranged the talk table with books and materials, I had a quick walk around the reserve. The tadpoles are just at the moment of growing legs – some have none, some two, some four: it’s very beautiful and touching.

A keen entomologist came running, a Clouded Yellow presumably blown in on the warm southerly wind had breezed across the reserve in front of the hut! They are only occasional visitors here, common enough in France, but they hardly ever perch when the weather is warm.

A Pompilid Spider-Hunting Wasp with prey ... on a sheet of paper in the hut
A Pompilid Spider-Hunting Wasp with prey … on a sheet of paper in the hut

A second entomological excitement: a Pompilid spider-hunting wasp was running rapidly about on some papers in the hut, dragging something white below her body. The photo shows what the naked eye could hardly perceive: she had a paralysed spider as big as herself in her jaws (a leg has broken off). She was presumably running about to find a suitable hole to bury the unlucky spider in, complete with one of her own eggs which will hatch and eat the spider as a supply of fresh, living food, enough to keep it going until it pupates.

Masked Hunter Bug, camouflaged with sand grains
Masked Hunter Bug, camouflaged with sand grains

A surprisingly large audience congregated for the talk, which looked at tricks that animals use to conceal themselves, often in plain sight. I demonstrated using painted cylinders in the fortunately bright sunlight how countershading works and why it is necessary; and how some animals like skunks and honey badgers use it in reverse to make themselves as conspicuous as possible. We all marvelled together at the wonderful camouflage of the Masked Hunter Bug, the Flat-tail Horned Lizard, and perhaps best of all the Potoo, beloved of Hugh Cott, motionless with its astonishing disruptive markings in the fork of a tree. I risked bringing out my copy of Abbott Thayer’s Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, complete with his fine but sadly misguided paintings of camouflaged Peacock, Roseate Spoonbills and Wood Duck. He was right about the principle of countershading, and the superb disruptive plumage of gamebirds, though.

Then we had more lemonade and ate the camouflaged cakes!

See also the blog article that trailed the talk.

Conservation, Environment, Love of Nature, Philosophy

Love of Nature? Man vs Nature? How Very Odd

There is something distinctly odd about the British love of nature. I mentioned the subject at a book launch the other day, and the person I was chatting to said, between sips of the very nice white wine and a nibble of the focaccia, that he thought the British were not really in love with nature any more as a personal activity, but were just consumers, passively and vicariously absorbing what is offered up as a commodity. I said that was ‘interesting’.

The ‘in love’ view of the British perhaps blends several different stereotypes. One is the obsolete stiff upper lip, the naturalist out in some far outpost of forgotten empire, enthusiastically carrying on studying phasmids like James Wood-Mason, writing obscure papers in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for the benefit of anyone of similar inclination.

Another is the hugely enthusiastic amateur naturalist – the keen birdwatcher, entomologist or botanist with telescope, moth-trap or vasculum always to hand, hoping to add a species or two to a county list.

Yet another is the happy gardener, always outside – rain or shine – pruning, digging, composting, planting, watering, weeding.

The stereotype that my wine-sipping acquaintance had in mind was presumably rather different: couch potatoes, relaxing with a remote in the sitting-room, allowing an hour of television gardening with Monty Don or a year in the life of some wildlife area – the Canadian Rockies or the Great Barrier Reef, the Patagonian plains or the last surviving bit of the Sundarbans, or worse, all of the above, cut together by an editorial team with a high concept of Surviving Against All the Odds or something – to wash over their minds, leaving no particular trace other than a feeling of having seen a lot of colourful flickering images.

Personally, I doubt that picture is fair, though like all stereotypes it must make some contact with reality somewhere. People are all different, and everyone needs to relax sometimes.

A truth, though, that everyone who likes some kind of experience of nature, live or through book, film, photograph or website, is that if we’re studying or watching nature without doing something to help protect it, we are ignoring a very large existential threat indeed. Assuming we manage not to destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, we are going to have to work out how to survive an ecological disaster of our own making. Its epic proportions are becoming clear: the last time anything like this happened was at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago. Whether Luis Alvarez was right that an asteroid or comet crashed into the Earth to form the Chicxulub crater, the debris thrown into the atmosphere causing something like a nuclear winter, it is certainly the case that huge numbers of species became extinct very quickly, including all the world’s large dinosaurs (yes, I know we have the birds still with us, and they’re in the dinosaur clade) along with perhaps three quarters of all other kinds of living thing.

You may perhaps feel somewhat untroubled by the idea that the world of your grandchildren might have no tigers or rhinoceroses in it; or even that there would be no areas of rainforest outside national parks – the Amazon and the forests of Sumatra and Borneo are well on the way there already.

You might be slightly less thrilled at the news that many of the world’s hotspots for variety of animals and plants will be gone completely: as South Africa becomes warmer and drier, the whole Cape region as understood by botanists will move southwards – into the ocean – and disappear forever, that incredible wealth of flowers, all those extraordinary Proteas, will remain only as a memory.

Perhaps even that isn’t too worrying, just news from a far country? Well, the sea level will rise by several metres when the Antarctic ice-cap melts, flooding coastal plains and threatening to drown many cities.

Not a problem? Global warming, whatever may have caused it, is already making deserts expand. Droughts will become year-long from California to southern Spain, Sahel to Australia. Food prices will rise drastically; wars will be fought over water and other critical resources.

Still not your problem? Farmland all across America and Europe is already denuded of crop pollinators, especially honeybees and bumblebees. Grasses like wheat and rice are not affected, but much of your food, and vital fodder crops for farm animals – from alfalfa to zucchini – is utterly dependent on pollination, and it’s in free fall.

What is all this about? How have we got into the crazy situation that half of us – some of us anyway – love the idea of nature, love to look at it (at least the pretty bits), while the rest (ok, possibly nearly everyone, whether we like nature or not) see themselves as separate from it? How separate can we be when we depend on it absolutely for the air we breathe – all the oxygen produced by green plants – and the food we eat – all our food coming from animals and plants? What are all those student notes in English literature about ‘man v nature’? We are part of nature. It isn’t even that nature is our survival blanket. We, like all other living things, are part of an ecosystem. The mosquitoes that bite you on holiday are in no doubt that you are edible. You eat chickens or carrots, beef or beans. Billions of bacteria in your gut share that food with you, consuming some, helping you absorb the rest. Eventually, bacteria will consume you, if you don’t get yourself cremated first. You are part of nature, no doubt about it.

So, how are you going to change what you do, to help keep this system working? Right now, it’s already badly broken, and getting worse each year. We haven’t got long to fix it.

Book Review, Environment, Love of Nature

Book Review: The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane

Macfarlane knew Roger Deakin (see my review of Wildwood), and was inspired by meeting him and visiting his extraordinary house. As a young, tree-climbing academic in the distinctly tame countryside of Cambridge, just sitting in the top of his favourite tree outside the city simply wasn’t enough to satisfy his craving for wildness.

The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane
The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane

So, for The Wild Places, Macfarlane sets out to the farthest shores of the British Isles, trying both to redraw his map of these islands – not with roads and cities, but coasts and mountains and woods and bogs, linked by ancient footpaths and holloways (roads worn down into the land by centuries of feet and cartwheels), and to define for himself what wildness really means.

In the space of fifteen carefully-crafted chapters, with titles like
Beechwood, Moor, Grave, Holloway and Saltmarsh, Macfarlane introduces us to some of his favourite places, views, treasures – in the form of found stones and shells and bits of wood, in a Deakinesque manner.

Where Jay Griffiths (see my review of Wild) is passionate, even overheated, and Deakin is calm but subtly warm, fiercely rooted in wood, Macfarlane can seem at first rather cold and intellectual: skilful with words, but oddly bloodless. It takes some chapters to start to realize the quality of The Wild Places; a desire to immerse oneself in wildness (both Deakin and Macfarlane favour swimming the wild way, Deakin notably traversing many of our wilder rivers
in his book Waterlog).

There is a plan to the book: around the British Isles, upside down; around the different kinds of wild place – high, low, wet, dry, hard, soft, empty, populated. The last is plainly a surprise to Macfarlane, who travels from an initial rather romantic conception of the places unaffected by man (as if), to places with strong energies of their own, and the people who naturally go with them. There is a bit of dialectic about all this – a thousand student essays on Man vs Nature, perhaps – but it becomes clear that Macfarlane is coming down to earth, and warmth creeps into his writing.

Macfarlane is at his best describing the wonderful diversity of life in the Burren: a rainforest in miniature, in the deep narrow grykes between the clints, the hard, dry exposed slabs of limestone pavement: an endangered habitat if ever there was one. And his love for Coruisk, beyond The Bad Step in the Cuillin Hills of the Isle of Skye, shines out despite any clever word-schemes or devices.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

See also Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Book Review, Love of Nature, Natural History

Book Review: Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin

Roger Deakin
Roger Deakin

Deakin died just after finishing Wildwood, so this book is automatically poignant: not just a celebration of life and wildness, but also an epitaph for this wonderful, crazy, brilliant, down-to-earth
craftsman of wood and words.

Wildwood, by Roger Deakin
Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin

Deakin was very comfortable with wood, and in woods. Indeed there was a timber merchant named Wood in his family, and one of his father’s Christian names was Greenwood, so he tells us. It is at once personal, uncompromising, and captivatingly narrated. There is no academic or intellectual lamentation about how we have lost touch with nature, no vague generalisation: but the truth emerges, clearly and naturally.

He rebuilt his ancient moated house, from a mossed-over, wooded-up ruin, into a lovely, light, airy place: in the process getting to know every one of the 300 beams (“300 trees: a small wood”) that made up the ancient oak frame of the house. He describes the carpenter’s marks on the beams – cut ready to fit together, then transported and assembled on site.

His wanderings about Britain may seem random, but are highly directed: to the places where the Green Man may be found in a dozen churches; to the home of that most English of plants, the Cricket Bat Willow; to the places where those old badgers, Cobbett and Ruskin, protested the injustices meted out to the common man. There is nothing “quaint”, no “folklore” here: just a constant delight in nature, a steady slow-burning fuse of evidence, of hard-won knowledge lightly worn.

Or he shares his visit to the Pilliga forest in New South Wales,
describing in careful but lightly-told detail how the forest of today is not what it seems; how Charles Darwin saw an open park-like woodland, not the dense and lovely tangles that people imagine is the ancient wooded landscape of Australia. He tells from intimate knowledge of the species of trees that used to dominate; of the skill of the Aborigines in managing the land with fire; of the extinction of the local Kamilaroi language, ironically just as the first and last dictionary of that lost tongue was published.

Deakin is not afraid of seeming tame: he is as much at ease telling us about a Bluebell picnic – on a lawn with a woodland view, accompanied by a posse of Cambridge botanists – as roaming the Outback. His knowledge is deep, even encyclopaedic: he collected facts as he collected interesting pieces of wood, stones, feathers – kaleidoscopically. It’s just a pity that there’s no index in the current paperback edition – let’s hope the publisher rectifies this soon.

Wildwood is, quite simply, a delight. You will want to visit the places described; you will look afresh at the wild places you know; and you will be glad that you met Deakin, in the only way that is now possible, through his graceful and supple writing.

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See also the review of Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm