Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture and spirituality. Roger Deacon was a nature writer, broadcaster, and filmmaker.

He's the author of Waterlog, a swimmer's journey through Britain,

Wildwood, a journey through trees, and notes from Walnut Tree Farm, compiled posthumously from his diaries.

He died in August 2006.

Here, Robert McFarlane, author of Underland, A Deep Time Journey, The Old Ways, and Landmarks, and a dear

friend of Rogers reads East of Eden, an excerpted chapter from Roger's book Wildwood,

in which he journeys into the wild fruit forests of Kazakhstan. In his introduction and postscript

to the chapter, Robert shares the story of the memory tree that he planted in Roger's honor.

In the summer of 2006, my friend the writer, forester, and naturalist Roger Deakin, died of cancer, too fast and too young.

A woodsman to the last, his pine coffin was decorated with a wreath of oak leaves,

and his ashes were given to the earth in view of mature stands of cherry, oak and silver

birch. I was new to death then, but even had I not been the loss of

Roger would still have struck hard to my heart. I want my friendships to come up unstoppably,

like weeds, Roger wrote once in a journal entry, and our friendship, though only a handful of years old, was a weedy one,

flourishing out of all proportion to its calendar.

Roger's abrupt death felt most cruel to me in its lopping of future growth.

We'd made such plans to stake out the badger sets in a wood near Rogers' Suffolk home at Walnut Tree Farm, with some infrared goggles that Roger was confident he could source.

To construct a coracle, birchwood frame, cowhide hull, and then paddle it across a meaningful stretch of ocean, or failing there to cross a good-sized pond.

There were books to write together, conservation battles to fight, television programmes to make,

...