Roger Deakin’s name crops up time and time again in the work of Robert Macfarlane, and always with affection and admiration. It wasn’t until I read The Wild Places that I felt the urge to learn more about the writer, film maker, and environmentalist who died in 2006. Deakin only published one book in his lifetime, Waterlog. Two others, Wildwood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, appeared posthumously. The latter collects together entries from Deakin’s notebooks made over several years and organizes them into a sort of monthly anthology. Here you’ll find descriptions of and reflections on the natural world, most of it within easy reach of the ancient cottage Deakin restored in Suffolk. Sometimes he strays further afield (Devon and Somerset, for example), but it’s mostly the woods, hedgerows, and animal life of East Anglia that catches his attention. And what attention it was. The color of a bird’s eye, the movement of a spider, the smell of newly cut logs – these details were pure joy for Deakin and noticing them was, in his mind, an obligation. Deakin’s life was one lived in the natural world, not distanced or separate from it, and his writing communicates so well the intense pleasure that came from that.