The shape of a lovely book

 Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a collection of notes or jottings — 411 by my fallible count.

Some notes run for a few pages. Some are a sentence.

The items are mostly about the natural history of Mellis, a village in Suffolk. But there are also notes on conversations with interesting friends and investigations into the history and culture of the place. Deakin takes trips to other spots in England. He talks of books, music, architecture and manners. He speaks of cats (mostly adoringly) and dogs (mostly not).

He talks a lot about trees and about swimming in wild places. He wrote books on both topics.

Since most of the items are about natural history, the 411 notes were organized under the 12 months, connecting his observations to the seasons. I counted 49 notes in July and 20 in December.

The jottings are not connected, and if you expect to get into a long narrative, you’ll be disappointed. If you focus on any single note, you are missing something larger. Each note or jotting is like a shard or fragment in a mosaic.

The larger picture: If you read long enough, you get a sense of an unusual mind.

It’s the kind of book I wish all my friends would write.

• Sources and notes: Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009.

My intermittent series of notes on Roger Deakin began with a remark about his preference for jottings — spontaneous notes written without any thought to the craft of writing (“The overlooked genre of jottings,” Sept. 14, 2023). This is the tenth item in the series.

Incidentally, Deakin did not compile this book. His friends did, after he died in 2006 at 63. They carved a book out of his enormous collection of notebooks. I hope my writing friends will start compiling their own book now and not let this job fall to their literary executors.