Gone from the greenwood

NatureIt took 300 oak trees - a small wood - to build the moated Suffolk farmhouse that Roger Deakin bought as a ruin in 1968, lovingly remade around himself and lived in for almost 40 years. The figure speaks for an infinitely more spacious world, in which the tree was nature's boon companion to human life, art and enterprise.

The empathy with trees and wood is still (or, perhaps, once again) vibrant in the next-door island and producing some exceptional writing. Deakin's is among the best ever, steeped in his feeling for "the intimate kinship of ecology and poetry". A refugee from over-organised urban life, he sprang late to literary notice with Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain (1999). This offered a quizzical "frog's eye view" of the rural scene from successive rivers, lakes and streams, and became a best-seller by word of mouth.

In its successor - and, tragically, his last work - Deakin sets off along green-shaded paths to revisit charmed sixth-form holidays, camping in the New Forest and soaking up expert facts about newts and spiders. A school friend was George Peterken, now an authority on native woodlands, and the book's discursive trail leads to mature rambles with other eminent "green men" of his East Anglian circle, among them Ronald Blythe and Richard Mabey.

While independent trees are his heroes and mentors, and tall woodlands his groves of wisdom and delight, what people have done with wood gives Deakin his destinations - each, as it were, discovered in the next clearing. We find out how to build a "bender" house of hazel, plant willows in a withy bed, curve ash trees to weave a leafy bower on a hill. We are schooled in the shaping of cricket bats and the choice of their grain to claim a thousand runs. We even visit the car factory that shaves veneer from walnut burrs, as if with a pencil sharpener, "imparting to the Jaguar cockpit the rich glow of a classic violin".

But with sculptors and land artists Deakin finds his richer revelations. Working with wood, he persuades us, liberates a creativity touching on the metaphysical. In a chapel studio among spoil-heaps of Welsh slate, he joins sculptor David Nash: one of the many occasions in the book in which, for all Deakin's descriptive gifts (indeed, directly because of them) one longs for illustrations.

"Nash prefers his work unadorned," he writes, "leaving the mark of the tool on the wood. The chainsaw leaves circular marks, often blackened. The axe leaves roughness and torn slivers. Polished or finished surfaces resist your gaze, distracting it from the essential form. Instead, Nash's grainy, cracked, warped, sawn, fissured, charred, scarred and hollowed works absorb the light, involve the viewer . . . "

Deakin surrounded himself with wood, not only in the farmhouse with its half-dozen separate desks, each occupied according to his mood, but in the shepherd's huts, the ancient caravan, the railway wagon that he embedded among leaves. Here he finds a deep peace, agreeing with Thoreau that "electricity kills darkness, candlelight illuminates it".

Sometimes he sleeps outdoors, in a small tent in someone else's wood. There is an episode, superbly written, in which he spreads his sleeping bag in a rookery and, "drugged by bluebells", lets the rooks murmur him to sleep. The ensuing chapter, its reflections and observations unfolding from a gilded sunrise, will find its way into a long succession of anthologies of nature writing.

Wildwood is not, however, perfectly judged. Later chapters offer excursions among trees in central Australia, Poland and Kazakhstan - each worthy in itself, and raising enjoyable shades of Bruce Chatwin, but loosening the distinctively English spell in which he has held us from the start. The journeys were part of a purpose and their inclusion all the more understandable given the author's death, from a brain tumour, in August 2006: this is all the Deakin we are ever going to get. And whatever happens to nature in this uncertain century, his book will remind us of some of the best late temperate greenwood there ever was.

Michael Viney is an Irish Times columnist and writer. His last book, Ireland: A Smithsonian Natural History, was published in Ireland by Blackstaff Press

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees By Roger Deakin Hamish Hamilton, 400pp. £20