I don’t know about you, but my eyes are starved for colour. I
long to see green foliage and clear blue skies. If the bleak January landscape
of white on white with shades of grey is starting to play with your psyche and
if you’re not about to jet away to the Caribbean any time soon, may I suggest a
quick and economical alternative?
Here is a good book all about trees, so you can pull the
drapes against the drabness and indulge in deciduous dreams at your leisure.
Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees is beautifully written, each
chapter weaving facts with personal anecdotes about our complex and perhaps
often unexamined relationship with wood, trees, woodlands and forests. Tree
huggers unite, because there is something in this marvellous book for every
interest or reason for loving trees.
Take, for example, the chapter entitled “Among Jaguars.” I
turned to it believing I was going to be whisked off to the emerald rainforests
of Central and South America. Not so. Deakin takes us to the Jaguar factory in
Coventry, England and surprises us with some interesting data about the nuances
of the walnut burr, the coveted and costly part of the walnut tree that is used
exclusively to trim the mechanical beast’s dash, steering wheel and gearshift knob.
My favourite chapters, however, are “Willow” and “Ash,” two
exquisite paeans in prose about two very lovely trees species that grace our
lives and our landscapes here too in southwestern Ontario.
In “Willow” we learn that there are more willow varieties in
the world than most of us realize, but only one, a special variety of the white willow, is used
to make the world’s best cricket bats. Yet Deakin’s curiosity for facts and
stories about man’s many uses of wood through the centuries reveals an
underlying reverence for trees just being, well, trees.
Of the willow he writes, ”All willows abound in life and
vigour, and their pliable wands give them grace.” Willow’s genus, Salix, he reminds us, stems from the
Latin verb salire, which means “to
leap.” And leap they do, as willow’s natural spontaneity means that new saplings
will emerge easily and readily from cuttings, all on their own and with little
help from us. Willows are often planted inadvertently when we simply drive a
willow fencepost into the earth or if we happened to leave a green log lying on
damp ground.
Nature, so glorious, no?
As for the chapter on the Ash, I can only say – just read it,
for under the spell of Deakin’s pen this great tree spreads its glorious branches
across your mind ― Fraxinus excelsior, a
name that exquisitely evokes its majestic essence ― making you want to run immediately to the nearest woods, find a
specimen for yourself and throw your arms about it.
He writes:
“I love the skin of ash, almost human in its perfect
smoothness when young, with the under-glow of green. It wrinkles and creases
like elephant skin at the heels and elbows of old pleachers where they have
healed. It bursts out in pimples or heat bumps where the epicormic buds are
about to break out into new shoots.”
Roger Deakin passed away in 2006, shortly after writing this
book. But by sharing his deep and abiding love for trees and the wooded places
in this world he has reminded us of how intertwined our human lives are with
those splendid giants among us who have given us fuel and furniture, ornament
and shelter across the ages and who sustain us still with their grace and beauty,
for whose soul is not stirred with wistful delight at the memory of a leafy canopy
of green above on a hot summer day.
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