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Monday 13th February

Notes From Walnut Tree Farm By Roger Deakin

Posted at 11:36AM Tuesday 30 Dec 2008

Notes from the Walnut Tree Farm
ISBN: 9780241144206

Deakin moved into Walnut Tree, a then derelict Elizabethan farmhouse, in the late 1960s. As he potters around his corner of Suffolk, he is uncomfortably conscious of the encroachments of modernity. New houses around the local common are too big, at odds with the local vernacular; alien tree species are supplanting the native trees; even when a "conservation hedge" is planted nearby, it fails to reflect the local predominance of blackthorn.

Put so baldly, these remarks make him sound like a grumpy old man. Their tone, though, is not a querulous "why, oh why?" but a careful setting out of a philosophy, characterised as controlled inertia.

Scythes beat strimmers because they're more pleasant to use; old barns or "half-derelict hollow pollards" beat nesting boxes for owls. "Once, in Suffolk, the i's were all undotted and the t's all uncrossed. Now everyone's busy crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's in the landscape," he laments in March.

Sometimes the prose feels ripe for parody. Read right through, it contains more information than most people could possibly need about the maintenance of pollarded and coppiced trees.

Financial Times Review

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