Walnut Tree Farm is the name that Roger Deakin gave to his restored Tudor farmhouse in Suffolk, England; in his book The Wild Places (reviewed in Geist 69), the British nature writer Robert Macfarlane describes Walnut Tree Farm this way: “It was as close to a living thing as a building could be. [Deakin] kept the doors and windows open, in order to let air and animals circulate. Leaves gusted in through one door and out of another, and bats flitted in and out of windows, so that the house seemed almost to breathe.” The passages that make up Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (Hamish Hamilton) have been gleaned from the exercise books in which Deakin recorded his “daily life, work, thoughts and memories” during the last six years of his life (he died in 26 at the age of sixty-three). The entries have been arranged chronologically from January (“a mauve, misty penumbra across the fields under a duck-egg sky”) through spring and summer (“Everywhere I go, in Devon, or in Somerset, the men are out in the churchyards mowing every blade of grass in sight”) and back again to winter (“The moat is frozen. Leaves are frozen in it like ash in amber”). Although it may lack the cohesiveness of Deakin’s Wildwood (27), Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a wonderful gloss to that earlier book, crammed with insights and vivid imagery from a life lived slowly and in harmony with the land.