A graceful tour of ancient woods

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nolead begins By Roger Deakin

Free Press. 392 pp. $26.95

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Reviewed by Susan Salter Reynolds

Can someone tell me why old-fashioned naturalists write so beautifully and present-day environmentalists write so badly? Roger Deakin belongs to the former group, and his writing, in this and his previous book,

Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain

, is teeming with creation. Bluebells, badgers, cow parsley, hazel, hedgerows, foxglove, rooks, robins, and small-leaved limes - this is pagan England, land of Celts and fairies.

Waterlog was about water; Wildwood is about wood. "In the woods," Deakin writes, "there is a strong sense of immersion in the dancing shadow play of the leafy depths, and the rise and fall of the sap that proclaims the seasons is nothing less than a tide, and no less influenced by the moon." Trees, yes, those in his backyard and beyond, but also the enduring uses of wood, the many ways we live with wood: heat, chairs, cricket bats, artists who work in wood.

Deakin, who founded the British environmental group Common Ground, lived on a farm in Suffolk that he purchased in 1969, rebuilding the 16th-century timber-frame house and tending the orchards and walnut trees; coppicing the wood (cutting young tree stems down to encourage shoot growth) to provide habitats for a variety of insects and animals.

Every naturalist (especially those of English descent) must explore the myth of the Green Man. Deakin makes his pilgrimage to the sacred groves of Devon and the Nemet River (today the River Mole). The Green Man, he writes in another resonant passage, "is the spirit of the rebirth of nature. He is the chucked pebble that ripples out into every tree ring. He is a green outlaw and he is everywhere, like a Che Guevara poster."

Bluebells give off a phosphorescence that "blurs the blue meniscus lapping at the trees." A "woodpecker shrieks across the field. A wasp worries the windowpane." Badgers knock the tops off dustbins like teenagers, "emerging early from the snouting dingles of the town at dusk." A pearl-bordered fritillary butterfly settles on his book, "enjoying the reflected sunlight."

The author sleeps in a shepherd's hut on his land. He builds himself an ash bower, with a floor of ivy and mosses, "eight trunks cross-gartered with wild hops," a thatch roof of "soporific female flowers" that "hang from the green ceiling like grapes."

Deakin might well be a reincarnation of the Green Man, with his Franciscan lifestyle and insistence on pure life. Certainly he speaks the language of a richer time, of droving, barrows, scything. He leads his reader blindfolded down strange paths and shines his beam on infinite ecosystems.