Notes From Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin, David Holmes (Illustrator)

For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks. In them, he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations about and around his Suffolk home, Walnut Tree Farm. Collected here are the very best of these writings, capturing his extraordinary, restless curiosity about nature as well as his impressions of our changing world.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel, Natural History, Biography, Essays

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2008

About the author

This is the disambiguation profile for otherwise unseparated authors publishing as Roger Deakin

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something exciting about reading somebodies diary or thoughts for a day, I don't know if Roger was considering publishing them or not but I'm glad they did. From the opening paragraph you can see why he is considered one of the great nature writers:

"1st January
I am lying full length on my belly on frozen snow and frosty tussocks in the railway wood blowing like a dragon into the wigwam of a fire at the core of a tangled blackthorn bonfire. I am clearing the blackthorn suckers that march out from the hedge like the army in Macbeth, the marching wood, threatening to overwhelm the whole wood in their dense, spiny thicket"

That was the first thing he wrote that year, it instantly grabs the readers attention and the book flows wonderfully after that. You get more thoughts, poems, memories from trips, a run-down on work carried out that day and regular updates on his cats. At times he can be very philosophical, asking those questions that have never crossed your mind.

For a while I was sensing a sadness to the writing, he came across as being lonely living so far away from friends and barely mentioning his family. Then once you realise that it is more a oneness with nature the whole books seems to brighten slightly.

Some favourite parts for me were rescuing a young hedgehog that was too weak to hibernate and his rants about so many outsiders moving in and not caring for the surrounding area, just spend their time driving around in their armoured 4WDs. Finally a weird moment, I read a paragraph just before going out and Roger sees a Speckled Wood Butterfly at his window, 45min I then saw my first ever Speckled Wood.

This is a brilliant book and if I ever get asked the question "Pick one writer from history you have dinner with then it would be Roger Deakin"

Blog post is here> https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2018...

[Claire Fuller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting one. I LOVE Deakin's Waterlog, and I assumed I would love this too. I did love his writing and his fine and detailed observations about the nature around him in his Suffolk garden and even what flies and walks into his house at night - the young hedgehog beside the stove for example. But what I didn't enjoy was...I don't even know how to put this...his moaning. He doesn't like it when he hears people using chainsaws (although he uses one), he doesn't like it when people drive 4WDs, he doesn't like when people mess up streams and ponds. All with good reason. I don't have a problem with what he complains about but I do with what whoever edited this book (it was put together after his death from several years worth of journals) decided to include. There is a grousing and grumbling voice that comes across too strongly, when Deakin clearly also feels much joy. It made me start picking at his personal life choices - for example he writes often about his cats and how much he loves them, and yet domestic cats are estimated to kill 100 million animals each year in the UK.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a hard nut to crack for me. At first it seemed disjointed and the random jottings of some guy who lived in England.

Actually, that's exactly what the book was: the random jottings of some guy who lived in England. Except that it wasn't just any guy. It was Roger Deakin. Roger Stuart Deakin was an English writer, documentary-maker and environmentalist. In 1968 he bought Walnut Tree Farm, a semi-ruined Elizabethan moated farmhouse on the edge of Mellis Common, near Diss in Suffolk, which he lovingly rebuilt and developed over many years and where he lived until his death from a brain tumour, first diagnosed only four months previously. The house and its surroundings were the subject of two Radio 4 documentaries produced by Deakin ('The House' and 'The Garden'). Notes from Walnut Tree Farm - a collection of writing taken from his personal notebooks and largely focusing on the wildlife and ecology of the area around his farmhouse.

I include one of his obituaries in this review, because it was only after reading it that I began to appreciate the book and the man himself, to appreciate the subtle nuances of what he was trying to say in this book. I enjoyed the book immensely, and am only saddened that I discovered him after his death -- I would have liked to have known him in life, to experience such enthusiasm and love of nature at first hand, to let it strengthen my own.

Force of nature

The environmentalist Roger Deakin, author of the bestselling Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain, died last month, aged 63. Robert Macfarlane celebrates his writing and wild enthusiasms.

In 1968, Roger Deakin bought the ruined remains of an Elizabethan house, and 12 acres of surrounding meadow, on the edge of Mellis Common in Suffolk. Little survived of the original 16th-century dwelling except its spring-fed moat, overhung by hazels, and its vast inglenook fireplace. So Roger put a sleeping-bag down in the fireplace, and lived there while he rebuilt the house around himself.

Walnut Tree Farm, the house he eventually completed, and in which he died a month ago, is made largely of wood. It is as close to a living thing as a building can be. When big easterlies blow, its timbers creak and groan "like a ship in a storm", as Deakin put it, "or a whale on the move". He kept the doors and the windows open, in order to let air and animals circulate. Leaves gusted in through one door and out of another. Swallows flew to and from their nest in the main chimney. It was a house which breathed. Spiders slung swags and trusses of silk in every corner. As I sat with Deakin, 10 days before his death, a brown cricket with long spindly antennae clicked along the edge of an old biscuit tin.

The fields, well tended but unfarmed, were also busy with life. Sparrow-hawks busked for custom overhead, deer picked their way through the hornbeam wood and tawny owls hooted from big ash trees. The land was separated into fields by a mile of massive old hedgerow, in places five metres high and five wide. Deakin had a habit of driving his cars until they were about to give out, then backing them into a particularly deep area of hedge and abandoning them, to be grown through by the briars and nested in by birds. Walking the fields with him, you would come across old Citroëns with their frog-eye headlights, peeping from the brambles. "All that needs is a new engine, and we could drive it to France," he said, hopefully, as we passed one of these.

Deakin wrote as idiosyncratically as he did everything. Thinking my way through his house now, I can count at least five different desks, between which he would migrate according to his different moods. His sleeping-places changed, too. Over the years he had established in his meadows a variety of outlying structures, including two shepherd's huts, an old wooden caravan with a cracked window and a railway wagon that he had painted Pullman-purple. He once emailed me happily about having been out in the wagon with the rain whacking on the roof. "An amazing thunderstorm last night as I lay listening. Like being inside a kettledrum with a whole symphony going on out there and with thunder in wraparound quadraphonic!" When he wasn't writing, he was usually swimming, most often in his moat, or wallowing in the massive cast-iron bath that lived at the back of the house.

In his relaxed contrarianism, his environmentalism (he was a founder member of Friends of the Earth, and co-founded Common Ground, the organisation which has campaigned so significantly for "local distinctiveness") and his enthusiasm, Deakin was a latter-day Thoreau. Except that where Thoreau lived by his pond for a total of several months over several years, Deakin lived by his moat for nearly four decades, watching and noting the habits of the trees, creatures, wind, sun and water around him. Walnut Tree Farm was a settlement in three senses: a habitation, an agreement with the land, and a slow subsidence into intimacy with a chosen place.

It was while doing lengths in his moat that Deakin had the idea for what would become Waterlog. Published in 1999 in a small print run, the book quickly became a word-of-mouth bestseller. Starting from the moat, Deakin set out to swim through the rivers, lakes, streams and seas of Britain, and thus to acquire what he called "a frog's-eye view" of the country. The result was a masterpiece: a funny, lyrical, wise travelogue which was at once a defence of the wild water that was left and an elegy for that which had gone. Here is a section from his exploration of the streams and lakes of the Rhinogs, a remote mountain group in North Wales:

Searching the map, I had seen some promising upland streams, a waterfall, and a tarn, so I hiked off uphill through the bracken. There is so much of it in the Rhinogs that the sheep all carry it around on their coats like camouflaged soldiers. I watched a ewe standing between two rocks the shape of goats' cheeses. They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones. He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape. By grazing the moors and mountains they keep the contours - the light and shade - clear, sharp and well-defined, like balding picture-restorers constantly at work on every detail. The black oblongs of their pupils set deep in eyes the colour and texture of frog skin are like the enormous slate coffin-baths you see in the farmyards here; seven-foot slabs of slate hollowed into baths.

Sheep like soldiers, stones like cheeses, stones like sheep, sheep like picture-restorers, sheep's eyes like frog skin, sheep's pupils like slate baths ... this joyful promiscuity of comparison is characteristic of Deakin's prose. It was a function of his immense enthusiasm and curiosity, but it was also, in its way, a literary playing out of the first principle of ecology: that everything is connected to everything else, or as John Muir put it, that "when one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world".

But Deakin was capable of lyrical precision as well as paper-clip-chain metaphors. When he wrote that "Redstarts flew from tree to tree, taking the line a slack rope would take slung between them; economy in flight is what makes it graceful", it is the economy of the prose which makes the observation graceful. His description of a kingfisher "streaking by in an afterburn of blue" catches exactly the experience of one's eyes not being quick enough to follow the flying bird.

In its poetry, its ecological conscience, and its visionary quality, Waterlog should be understood as belonging to a tradition of English land-art which includes the sculptors David Nash and Peter Randall-Page, as well as writers such as Ronald Blythe, Richard Jefferies and John Clare. But another type of Englishness runs strong in Deakin's work, and that is his gently silly comedy - the humour of Kenneth Grahame, Jerome K Jerome, AA Milne, PG Wodehouse and even Enid Blyton.

The result of this mixture is that you finish reading Waterlog invigorated, and with a changed relationship to water and to nature. It is a book, as Heathcote Williams nicely punned, which leaves you with a spring in your step.

The influence of Waterlog was immense. Despite its thoroughgoing Englishness, it won admirers in Australia, Canada and Europe. It prompted a revival of the lido culture in Britain, and even the founding of a wild-swimming company (a commercialisation of which Roger quietly disapproved). It also inspired untold numbers of readers to take to the open water.

So it was that, for instance, on a cold grey April day in Sutherland in 2004, I was to be found in the sprawling and remote Loch Sionascaig, in the shadow of Suilven, back-stroking out to an island while the rain fell hard on my face, already looking forward to telling Deakin about the swim. The loch was a mile or so from the road, and the pleasure came at a price: I returned to my car peppered in midge and tick bites. As I reached the road, another car came into view. Its driver stopped and wound down her window. "You've been swimming," she said. Dripping wet, and standing in my trunks, I could not deny it. "A bit early in the year, isn't it?" she said. The midges were discouraging longhand explanations, so I said that a friend of mine had written a book called Waterlog about wild swimming, and now I couldn't keep out of the water. She gave a surprised smile, reached down, and picked up the audio-tape of the book, to which she had been listening as she drove that lonely road.

Travel with Deakin was even more unpredictable than travel under his influence. The dark-green Audi in which he journeyed to his last escapades had moss growing in its foot-wells ("three different sorts", he pointed out, proudly), and a variety of useful knives in the glove-box. Its boot always held a bivouac bag, a trenching tool of some sort and a towel and trunks, in case he passed somewhere interesting to sleep, dig, or swim. When lost while driving, which was most of the time, he had a habit of slowing almost to a halt on roundabouts and squinting up at the road-signs while I assumed the crash position. He was always proposing adventures: a night stake-out of a new badger warren "in a mysterious wooded tumulus in Thornham Woods", or a joint attempt to traverse an acre of ancient woodland from one side to another without touching the ground, like the hero of Italo Calvino's beautiful book, The Baron Of The Trees. "He's over 60," a friend said to me, "and he's still got the energy of a fox-cub."

One July we went to Dorset to explore the system of holloways or ancient drove-roads which seams that soft-stone county. We ended up sleeping in a hillside meadow, and cooking in the bed of the holloway. "A Vlach shepherd in the Pindos once taught me how to make a smokeless fire", Deakin remarked idly, before creating a tiny and, yes, smokeless fire that was hot enough for us to boil water on. His extraordinary life meant that he often began stories with sentences of this kind. "When I was living in a cave in Southern Greece ..." "Did I tell you how a hunter once shot at me because he thought I was a bear?" (the point of the story was how pleased he was to have been mistaken for an animal). We had plans to travel together to Cumbria, and at some point, Australia. He wondered if we could earn our passage out to the Antipodes as oarsmen on a quinquereme. I wasn't sure that we could.

For the seven years after finishing Waterlog, Deakin was at work on a book about woods. He disapproved of the habit of fetishising single trees - chieftain pines or king oaks. Trees to him were herd creatures, best understood when considered in their relationships with one another (he loved the way that oak trees, for instance, would share nutrients via their root systems when one of their number was under stress). Trees were human to Deakin, and humans tree-like, in hundreds of complicated and deeply felt ways. Researching his book, he travelled to Kyrgyzstan, Australia, Tasmania, America, and throughout Europe and the British Isles. It was a measure of his natural generosity and his devotion to nature that, even when he was near death from cancer, he could still speak without jealousy of the ability of trees to heal themselves.

Over the years the project sprawled, digressing into studies of the hula-hoop craze, his anarchist great-uncle, the architecture of pine-cones. The numbered notebooks containing his research fill a wall of the main study at Mellis. It's now clear that a brain tumour was trying to scatter his thoughts, stop him finishing the book. But enough was done by the time he died: Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees will be published early next summer, and is another major work.

A month ago, I drove to Mellis to see Deakin for the last time: held his hand, talked a little, until he fell asleep. The next day, I went with two friends, who had also known him, out to the north Norfolk coast. We swam in wild waves at dawn and dusk, and in the evening we read aloud the pages from Waterlog describing that magnificent coastline. We slept in the pine forests which run down almost to the sand at Holkham. I spent half the night in a hammock he had lent me, and half of it down on the needle carpet, where it smelt of sap and resin. Roger died a week later, still in the house that he had built around himself 38 years earlier.

A life lived so joyfully and so uniquely should not only be grieved over. But his death at 63 brought two unignorable losses. The first was to his family and many friends, for he would have grown old, properly old, so superbly. He was an expert in age: in its charisma and its worth; everything he owned was worn, used, reused. If anyone would have known how to age well, it was him.

The second loss was to literature. For his life to the point he wrote Waterlog - years in teaching, in film-making, even briefly in advertising - all fed into that exceptional book, and into Wildwood. But there were many more books to come. One about Essex, he told me, which I knew would also have been about the whole world. Another about aboriginality in the British Isles.

He was a prolific and brilliant correspondent, and his letters were always inset with beautiful field-notes, told for the joy of telling. The spring before his diagnosis, he wrote to me in excitement about new arrivals at Walnut Tree Farm:

Fox-cubs here, under the shed just beyond the shepherd's hut: the one that's invisible because under an enormous hedgehog of brambles. They are well-grown now and at dusk or dawn, frisking on the flattened grass, somersaulting, vaulting, tumbling as I watch them from my chair in the hedge. What spring means to a fully wound fox-cub!

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had not really heard of Roger Deakin, the writer and radio broadcaster, until I saw his other book, Wildwood, on the shelves at Waterstones. Having recently enjoyed other Rural Living books like The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill I was keen to read some more and Roger Deakin's books stood out. He was clearly much loved and admired by many. I ended up buying this one instead, being taken by the format of notes sorted into months with the intention of reading it in real time throughout 2012. Mostly I managed it, reading each month as it was happening and appreciating the year along with him.
The notes range from quite short observations, or thoughts of a few sentences to the occasional longer account over a page or so of some peculiar adventure or happening. All of the notes are taken from exercise books that Deakin kept during his last 6 years, being put together for this book posthumously. Deakin died in 2006 and most of the notes are about his home of 30 years in Suffolk, living, working on and exploring the land and countryside of his farm.
From describing the Hornets coming in through the study window, to how his cats smile, to jaunts to local forests, sometimes camping, to see how the trees are doing and which flowers are out, to meanderings on where to sleep that night (one of the various bedrooms, the shepherds hut or the tent). His disgruntlement and out and out anger at the wanton destruction of green land is also vented between the pages, ancient woodlands thoughtlessly and cruelly wasted in the name of progress by another corporate landowner.
One of the main things that came across to me was his sense of freedom. There seems to be little to bind and shackle him. If he wants a dip in the moat he does so, meet a friend and go camping, spend an evening watching the local wildlife, or even writing in his study. He is not even tied to one bedroom, his obligations are only to his own work on the farm.
This freedom lends an atmosphere of ease to the book, it is a gentle, undulating read, with beauty on every page. Deakin has a pleasant voice, infused with a wisdom that comes from experience, of living close to nature and its rythmic life. He talks about the plants and trees as if they are his friends, and I believe they were. Constant friends. There is humour and sadness, sometimes loneliness accounted here too.
I loved this book, it was an ideal bedside companion because of the calm that came from the pages. Deakin's sense of wonder and reflection helps you to see the world differently. A wonderful read and highly recommended.

[Hilary · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book group choice, this was just not my cup of tea. I have a problem with this type of author: middle-class with no financial concerns able to pontificate on how everyone else is getting it wrong. The beauties of nature I get, but the overworked sentimental descriptions are almost nauseating. I would rather see these things for myself.

His elite circle of friends tells you all you need to know about the highbrow tone of this work, published posthumously in the form of a year in his life. Deakin observes nature spending enormous amounts of time coppicing etc, but to me shows little understanding of the harsh realities of life for those who have to work on the land (and I have no axe to grind in this respect). He worships nature, which I do not argue with, but fails to understand that we can all in our own small way appeciate its miracles without having to wax lyrical at every opportunity. Not for me.

[Bert · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am well on the way to becoming a tree myself. I put down roots. I sigh when the wind blows. My sap rises in the spring, and I turn towards the sun. My skin even begins to look more like bark every day. Which tree would I be? Definitely a walnut; an English walnut, Juglans regia, the tree with the greatest canopy." (p.69)

"The foundation of a first-class talent is eyesight - perception. The first-class writer always has first-class eyes. Those who observe quickly and vividly hold us with the details they see. Their stories have a flow that carries the reader.
The rare first-class writer has, in addition to keen sight and hearing (it may be because of them), feelings or emotions that are equally keen." (p.266)

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A perfect book to keep by the bed and read last thing at night, little by little as the seasons go by. It is a mix of Roger Deakin's diaries from several years and has been brilliantly edited. Evocative of the seasons and his deep love of the natural world, his cutting intelligence shines through allowing you to enjoy but keep the questions going.

[Sherrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second time of reading Roger Deakins book, and published after his sudden death, the book is taken from his many notebooks and written in diary form covering a year in his life. I love the random jottings, some go off on a tangent, his almost simplistic view of life and his detailed observations of nature. I'll probably read this again at some point.

[Swati · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy being in nature. I enjoy reading memoirs. Roger Deakins brings both together in “Notes from Walnut Tree Farm,” a nice little collection of his musings about life in a farmhouse in a remote corner of Suffolk, England. I’d never heard of Deakins before I came across this book. He was a renowned environmentalist and writer who bought Walnut Tree Farm, a crumbling, 16th century Elizabethan house and restored it himself in the 1960s-70s. He lived in that house until his death in 2006.

His descriptions run into great detail and contains everything around him from the trees to the birds to the earth. The book comprises a year’s worth of notes, beginning in January with no preamble whatsoever.

“I am lying full length on my belly on frozen snow and frosty tussocks in the railway wood blowing like a dragon into the wigwam of a fire at the core of a tangled blackthorn bonfire,” he says describing his endeavours to build a bonfire in the thick of winter.

The entire book ambles along, thus, mirroring the pace of country life. I initially found it difficult to get a grasp on the style as it was quite scattered and fragmented, as any diary would be. But after a while you get used to the style.

My biggest problem with the book, and it’s nothing to do with Deakins, was just how unfamiliar a lot of things were to me. For someone brought up in England, the names of some of the birds, trees, or seasonal detail might be easier to comprehend. I grew up with Wordsworth and Keats, poets who wrote extensively about the English countryside, but turns out they are no match for Deakins’ passionate linguistic nature sketches. Like this

“All along the edge of the sandlings, where the heavier Suffolk claylands begin as you head inland, the parkland oaks in the fields were all dead or dying.”

Plus, he also goes into descriptions of a lot of farm and gardening work with the extensive range of equipment at his disposal.

“The technique is to get right down on the ground and go in with the triangular bow-saw at ground level, then grab the cut stems…”

That said, I lost count of the number of passages I highlighted in this book for the lyrical writing and poetic landscape descriptions.

The Foreword describes it perfectly

“The entries themselves were altogether freer. Spontaneous, playful, impassioned and sometimes, experimental, they were Roger’s everyday observations, and reelected the events of his inner and outer life as they happened.”

It’s not an easy read for the reasons I mentioned but if you do get into it, then it’s as nice as warming your feet by the fire.

[Erik B.K.K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know what it's like to be a tree, sleep with a cat on your bed and feel it manoeuvring and exploring your curves and hollows for the most comfortable nest...


Can one really rate someone's diary? Especially when not written with the thought of publishing it? It's like reviewing someone's mind and personality. I like Deakin's personality. I'd like to think we would've gotten along. His eye was just as keen to see the far spread destruction of nature, his heart just as big to embrace all creatures small and big, to stand fast to protect the old landscape and way of rural living and battle change and careless robbing of the land for money.

I hate the reviews that rate this diary one star because Deakin "complains too much", or is too negative, or goes on too long about the dangers to nature, or they dismiss his message because he was "elite". People, your country is dying. It is simply dying. You poison the land, you kill the beasts, you pour raw sewage and mining waste down your rivers. You destroy ancient hedgerows to gain more acres of farmland and cut ancient trees just to plant fancy new ones. And it's not only so in Britain, but here in The Netherlands it's happening as well. And you have the audacity to call the only people who are fighting this grumpy moaners. If only everyone took it as seriously. If you want to keep fooling yourself all will be well and want to enjoy "nature" neatly demarcated and tidied up just go to a zoo.

[Sophy H · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be fair, Roger Deakin could write a shopping list and I think I'd love it!!

He makes me want to plant more trees, not rake up leaves, create more habitats for wild creatures, and just be at one with nature.

Deakin is a natural writer of all things outdoor.

I read him with a sense of awe and wonder, but also with a hint of melancholy, knowing he passed away in 2006.

I could literally underline and annotate every passage in the book but two favourites are these:-

"Cats are angels. They sustain me invisibly by their presence. They are full of love, and they engender peace. They are household angels, like the swallows in the chimney"

"Books are like seeds: they come to life when you read them, and grow spines and leaves. I need trees around me as I need books around me, so building bookshelves is something like planting trees"

Just lovely. This man was a pure gentleman of and in the world.

[Cath Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

The company of this book is greatly recommended. Read it as I did, over the course of a year, taking your time with the thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations Roger Deakin made over the last six years of his life in notebooks he kept at Walnut Tree Farm. It was very rewarding to go slowly with it.

[Mosco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noioso, noiosissimo...
se non sei il tipo che si incanta ad ascoltare una capinera, non spargi mangiatoie per uccelli in tutto il giardino, non salvi i ragni che nidificano sotto il lavandino, non nutri ricci, non passi pomeriggi sui libri a cercare "che fiore è", non hai dato ai PC della tua rete nomi di alberi, non stai scrivendo da un portatile che si chiama larice, nella rete "bosco". Io sono un tipo così, e Deakin mi è piaciuto molto.

[Sarah Swarbrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading this book slowly over this year, reading along with Roger Deakin and his seasons, observations and musings. A wonderful collection of thoughts and notes.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fittingly, this book is as organic a piece literature as you will ever read. Billed as a collection of Roger Deakin's own diary entries, it highlights both the author's natural writing ability and the type of lifestyle that any lover of the English countryside should aspire to. Deakin describes vividly the small nuances that make the life of a naturalist so fulfilling, and in turn the reader gets to share in these. After reading this I felt compelled to simply get outside more and to improve my knowledge of the countryside around. I want to be able to identify as well as Deakin what animal noises are peculiar at certain times of the year, and share the comfort he clearly takes from the flowering of various plants.

More than just the natural world and lifestyle he emersed himself in, we learn about the idiosyncratic character of this much-loved writer of mine - describing how he sleeps in different places each night and the bond he shares with his postman just adds so much personality to the book. It's like reading an autobiography but instead of contrived presentation, it's an immersive, subtle and comprehensive portrayal. Exquisite.

[Moses · Rating 5 out of 5]

A multitude of words

Calming, thought provoking, poetic and honest.

This is my second reading of Notes from Walnut Tree farm. I think I preferred the first reading; this (second) reading was a closer affair and I digested more meaning. It wasn't so fleeting or as light as the first.

This second reading had me feeling that Deakin was often hypocritical - critical of other 'faceless' people stripping the land for their own personal gain to the detriment of its eco-system, whilst he himself 'stripped' Hawthorne berries and gathered them into a big IKEA bag without really having a planned use for them. Not a heinous crime of course, just something that nagged at me.

Still, I give five stars because of the sheer individualism that shines through and the sense of getting away from it all, that Deakin invokes.

[Caroline Gerardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Borrowed this book, and wish I owned it. I'm a journal keeper, years of drawings, notes about my garden, a feather, a sticker from a campground, a poem, a wildflower once pressed now too fragile to open the page- all these treasures are mine packed in a wooden trunk that my father took away to war, now resting in my barn on the ranch. Enough about me, if you locate this book keep your hands on it, for I will surely sneak it into my hiking backpack and never return a happy woman

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

An observant man in tune with his surrounding natural world. However, got a little tired of the endless rants on modern life. Some of those things are very important for people who, unlike Deakin, don't have the luxury of a disposable income or tied down to a soul destroying job.

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely read. Well worth the time.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

The history of the countryside is more a history of skullduggary of one kind or another than has generally been recognized. Written records are only of moderate usefulness in delivering up the past: most of the real action was never recorded because it took place on the wrong side of the law. P17

Over the last year as I deepened my relationship with Robert MacFarlane, I got to know some of his friends. Roger Deakin was a particularly esteemed co-conspirator and his untimely death was a deep blow. I read the book RMF wrote as a tribute which took me here, to Walnut farm.

I am not lonely here because I feel so connected to the trees. P157

I am well on my way to becoming a tree myself. P69

Why write? A writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just reflect or report them as they are. P120

Poet, sculptor, activist and philosopher, RD was a conservationist as well as an innovator. Gentle and fierce, he stood up for the land and his rough mysticism gave him an exuberance that is contagious in these pages.

Our message was entirely pro-education and learning, yet we were being treated as deeply subversive. P181

I don't have a problem with anger, I have a problem with the things that make me angry, and I think the main problem is that most people...are not sufficiently angry about the things that upset me. P79

If they're going to ban smoking in public places, how about banning spraying in open country? P263

I like the way the book is organized by month emphasizing the seasonal rhythms. I can imagine a wonderful calender or day book with photographs of his beloved country and inspiring quotes.
Robert, how about it?

The artist doesn't sit in the studio waiting for the painting to come....p84

[Philippa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Roger Deakin's writing – and his thinking. Like Annie Dillard, he's so aware and observant of the smallest things in the natural world, and describes them so engagingly, vividly and poetically. He'll spend time watching an insect to understand its world. Yet he also has a long-term, holistic overview, thinking of how many hundreds of years an oak might have stood there, and observing the changes where he lives (Suffolk): modern human life ever encroaching on the rest of nature, taming it, reducing it, covering it over, polluting it.
But still his joie de vivre shines through, and a spirit of being at one with the world, not separate – there aren't many humans in the modern techno-cluttered urban world these days that retain or recognise such a deep connection with the nature that we are all part of. This is his gift, his reminder to us of what we may be missing.
This book was put together after Deakin's death, drawing together lots of diary entries, arranged to cover a year (although the entries have come from the last years of his life, but they're still placed with their season to form a year). At times it feels a little bitsy, but then some of the shortest entries were for me the most memorable and profound: "Trees make time stand still" and "My house was once an acorn".
As well as being a writer he was a woodworker, and so intimate with wood. Sounds like he was a master of coppicing. Wildwood was the first of his books I read, then Waterlog which is about swimming in rivers and lakes around England, Wales, Cornwall and I think Scotland. He really immersed himself in nature! Sad he is not still around to continue writing! He died in 2006.

[Bruce Hatton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is possibly the best book on Suffolk and contemporary country living I've read. It was collated posthumously by the author's partner Alison Hastie and is set in diary form, although entries can be from different years.
Roger Deakin bought the semi-ruined Walnut Tree Farm on the edge of Mellis Common in Suffolk, near Diss in 1968. He rebuilt and developed the farmhouse over many years and lived there until his death in 2006. He dredged the moat, where he swam daily, planted woodland and bought more of the surrounding fields, where he grew hay and wild flowers. The house was without central heating but housed several wide open fireplaces. A colony of swallows lived in the main chimney and for several years chickens and ducks shared his kitchen.
Deakin writes eloquently and passionately about rural life and frequently laments its downgrading. His knowledge of local flora and fauna and deep understanding of local history and ecology is breathtaking.
Even though I've lived in the Suffolk countryside most of my life (at the opposite end of the county to Deakin), I learnt so much from this book and was just sad when the year came to and end.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was put together from Roger Deakin's notes by a friend and his partner although not, on the evidence of these notes, partner in the sense of nightly bedsharing, or even particularly frequent shared activity, especially not compared with the mentions of other human contacts.

It was an interesting book and gave an insight into the process of writing - phrases were repeated, ideas jotted down for 'working up' later. His lifestyle was unusual - I particularly enjoyed his account of how he chooses nightly whether he will sleep in the shepherd;s hut or one of the two bedrooms in the house. There's some beautiful thought provoking writing and his account of losing his father at 17 and its impact was very moving without being overblown.

It's also irritating at times, as perhaps anything which documents every thought a person has will inevitably be.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew nothing of Roger Deakin before I read this book. I'd seen it briefly recommended on "First Tuesday Book Club" on ABC and bought it on the offchance it would be a good read. It was brilliant. Such beautiful words, diary entries throughout different times in his life at Walnut Tree Farm. My only regret is that I didn't discover him sooner, as he passed away in 2006, and I would have loved to have written him a letter to tell him just how marvellous he is. Bless you Roger Deakin. I adore you.

[Vibeke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Deakin has a unique way of looking at and sharing his thoughts about nature. Presented through his extraordinary, restless curiosity, this book is a very charming, inspiring, engaging and passionate read. To be read both for pleasure and thoughtfulness.

[Mark Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a love letter to the Suffolk countryside, and that's why I like it.

[Nancy Nell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed thinking about the NZ equivalents to rural UK. I would have liked to meet Roger Deakin, his writing is without artifice and fittingly natural.

[Millie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Roger Deakin's nature writing. It's honest and concise, and a pleasure to read.

[Katherine Simmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice collection of snippets, a fair few it was a shame he didn't have a chance to write up into a book.

[Jacqueline McNeil · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's impossible not to love Roger Deakin and his whimsical, random thoughts.