But at the same time, everywhere I looked I could see Roger’s presence: it overflowed from the lush wildness encroaching every inch of the landscape; and in the material objects of shepherd huts, abandoned vehicles, his chair by the moat, the piles of wood he had chopped, and the bath tub in which he wallowed.

Wildwood By Roger Deakin | Used | 9780141010014 | World of Books Wildwood By Roger Deakin | Used | 9780141010014 | World of Books

Outside in the wide expanse of the Republiky Alangy, a wedding party is assembled on the steps of the Monument to Independence in bright sunshine. Stopping to admire an orchard, Kuralay jumps up to pull down a branch, and we scrump an apple or two. In 1936 Fitzroy Maclean, whose book Eastern Approaches had informed my own journey, travelled exactly the same way on his first excursion out of Almaty, finding a place on a lorry heading out of the city. First we eat lamb shashlik in tender strips with a dried, hard cow cheese and bread, and savoury doughnuts that we dunk in sour milk. I swam under the spell of two books: Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur and Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, each of which made swimming feel like an expression of the liberated self, a declaration of existential intent.

In The Swimmer, Patrick Barkham – a fine author in his own right – takes this idea to its logical conclusion, mining and shaping that enormous, eccentric archive into a book that is, as far as we can make out, about four-fifths in Deakin’s own hand but reads like a first-person memoir. In spring the hills are ablaze with wild tulips, but in the dust of autumn all we see is the pale blue chicory. Further on through the woods, we stop by a little clearing and pick sweet hawthorn berries the size of fingertips. Waterlog, the predecessor to Wildwood, recounts his swimming adventures and has been hailed as a classic of nature writing. In winter ash trees are identifiable by their thick curving, grey twigs in opposite pairs and the small black velvety buds that appear at the ends.

Roger Deakin remembered | Books | The Guardian Roger Deakin remembered | Books | The Guardian

With Waterlog Deakin broke new ground, as well as water: it was both travel writing and nature study and very personal. And that it needed proper care, safe from damp and rodents, and accessible to the increasing number of people interested in Roger and his work. We had a lunch of vegetable soup, bread, cheese, and pickled herring; Roger’s two cats gingerly perched on the edge of the table, hoping for a taste. As I am Roger’s literary executor, and as our writings have become intertwined, many of these letters find their way to me.Literary archives can have a troublesome aura of fetish to them: laundry lists become holy writ, pens and pencils a saint's finger bones. His more ambitious work, Wildwood, a meditation on the relationship between humans and trees, came out after his death, as did Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, which was, like The Swimmer, mined posthumously from his journals. Juniper believed that by the time the ‘new’ apple had populated the northern slopes of the eastern Tien Shan and reached near Almaty, it had evolved into something like its present size and culinary appeal. To judge from the twenty-odd wild species that still exist in central and southern China, it probably bore a small fruit with hard but edible seeds not unlike those of its close relation, the rowan tree. We go pitching and rolling over the rounded foothills into the minor valleys of mountain streams, lurching through the fords, charging straight back up the next hill.

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Roger Deakin - Wildwood: A Journey BBC Radio 4 Extra - Roger Deakin - Wildwood: A Journey

We pace the brick floor of the Walnut Tree Farm kitchen, eavesdrop on its indoor and outdoor bedrooms. In the foothills and valleys of the Tien Shan range, the new apple found itself in a genuine paradise. Deakin would often challenge the local protectors whose duty it was to warn off people from "unhealthy" or "dangerous" water. It took me years to find it, but tucked away in a paragraph of “East to Eden” was a sentence that would grow through my own life in ways which are still surprising me now, more than a dozen years on.All of us , I believe , carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there :places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem'We are seven' ,our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened. There are fine apple orchards all over the city, as well as the wild apple woods on the slopes of the Alatau Mountains that rise like a wall behind it. After a long struggle to preserve the local as well as the global natural world, the drought and the cold of recent months in Britain had made him wonder whether the war to save the planet from the gloomy prospect of terminal climate change might have been lost. A tiny sprit warmer, but considering it's SPRING, there isn't a single bit of green anywhere except on the fields. Roger was one of those rare people whose character and passion is to be found in everything he made, collected, drew or wrote.