From a fascinating book to come out in January 2009 by Roger Deakin, called Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees:
Two days into my first camp, on 26 April 1959, we heard the first cuckoo and entered it into the Tomes [his diaries]. Under the strong influence of Robert Frost, I was moved to write a beginner's poem about it, later published in the school magazine, a lament for the ousted fledglings. "Who'll never fidget, squeak or yawn/beneath the breast that is your pawn." I remember feeling whining poetry was somehow subversive of the objective, scientific approach [his naturalist friend] Goater encouraged us to adopt. Yet him himself was always so full of enthusiasm and passion for nature he could never hide his own strong emotional attachment in Beaulieu Road and its natural history. Later more of my Beaulieu scribblings appeared in the magazine, a Wordsworthian effort occasioned by my first encounter with a marsh gentian...not one of us was immune to the poetry of the place. One boy, Greystoke, who had only ever stayed in luxury hotels before, took to camping with all the zeal of the new convert and never missed an opportunity to rediscover his inner backwoodsman at Beaulieu. It was only much later that I realized the whole point about Beaulieu was that in teaching me to make connections, it was revealing the intimate kinship of ecology and poetry.
[pic of the Beaulieu Woods in the UK from skink74 via Flickr]
