Free Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane Page B

chestnut, some of them more than four centuries old, held and jointed together with pegs of ash. In total, around 300 trees were felled to make the house, and the result was a structure that was organic to the point of animate. Truly, it was a tree-house, and in big winds it would creak and shift, riding the gusts so that being inside it felt like being in the belly of a whale, or in a forest in a gale. ‘I am a woodlander ,’ Roger wrote, ‘I have sap in my veins’ – and as such he was a waterlander too, for ‘a tree is itself a river of sap’.
    Roger once sent me a list of the apple varieties in the orchards of Girton College in Cambridge. He read them out when we next met, dozens of them, each a story in miniature, making together a poem of pomes: King of the Pippins, Laxton’s Exquisite, American Mother, Dr Harvey, Peasgood’s Nonsuch, Scarlet Pimpernel, Northern Greening, Patricia and (my favourite) Norfolk Beefing. It was a celebration of diversity and language, and it represented, Roger said, only a fraction of the pomology recorded in the
Herefordshire Pomona
, the great chronicle of English apple varieties.
    In the years he spent researching
Wildwood
, Roger travelled to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, the Pyrenees, Greece, Ukraine, Australia, North America and all over Britain and Ireland. He gathered a vast library of tree books, the pages of which he leaved with jotted-on Post-it notes. As it took root, the project also branched, digressing into studies of the hula-hoop craze, Roger’s anarchist great-uncle, the architecture of pine cones, the history of cricket bats and Jaguar dashboards, hippy communes, road protestors, the uses of driftwood … but returning always to individual trees and tree species.
    This specifying impulse distinguished Roger’s approach. In September 1990 he gave a World Wildlife Fund lecture on education, literature and children at the Royal Festival Hall, in which he spoke passionately about the virtues of precision. ‘The central value of English in education has always been in its poetic approach,’ he said, ‘through the particular, the personal, the microscopic observation of all that surrounds us.’ It was attention to such particularity, he argued, that best permitted a Keatsian ‘taking part in the existence of things’, and ‘the development of this ability to take part in the existence of things’ was in turn ‘the common ground of English teaching and environmental education’. Roger ended the lecturewith an attack on generalism as an enemy of wonder because it suppressed uniqueness. He quoted a passage from his beloved D. H. Lawrence in support of his argument:
The dandelion in full flower , a little sun bristling with sun-rays on the green earth, is a non-pareil, a nonsuch. Foolish, foolish, foolish to compare it to anything else on earth. It is itself incomparable and unique.
    Foolish, foolish, foolish Lawrence, though, for even as he celebrates the ‘non-pareil’ and berates the comparative impulse, he cannot prevent himself figuring the dandelion as a ‘little sun’, so that it is itself and not-itself at once. But Lawrence, like Roger, would have defended the metaphor as an intensifier rather than a comparator – a means of evoking the dandelion-ness of that dandelion, instead of diffusing its singularity. Some of Roger’s most precise observations of natural events used figurative language to sharpen, rather than to blunt, their accuracy. When he writes that ‘[r]edstarts flew from tree to tree , taking the line a slack rope would take slung between them; economy in flight is what makes it graceful’, it is the aptness of the ‘slack rope’ that makes the observation itself graceful. Like Baker, he was unafraid of elaborate comparisons: the ‘park-bench green ’ of a pheasant’s neck; a hornet ‘tubby, like a weekend footballer in a striped vest’.
    ~
    In the spring of 2006 I drove over to Walnut Tree Farm with my friend Leo and my son Tom,