Roger Deakin was born in Watford in 1943. He studied English at Cambridge University, where he was one of Kingsley Amis' protégés. In 1973 he married Jenny Hind, with whom he had a son, but the marriage was annulled in 1982.
He worked in advertising for a time in London, but, tired of the city, he decided to buy a farmhouse that had a large plot of land and a moat in Suffolk, Walnut Tree Farm, and set about restoring it; there he would live until his death. He began producing and directing documentaries, including two for BBC Radio 4 about the restoration of his house. It was at that time that his passion for the countryside and writing was born and, in 1999, he rose to fame with his work The Water Diaries (Impedimenta, 2019), which told of his journey through British rivers, wells and seas and which inspired another BBC documentary. The success of this experience led him to undertake a new journey through the oldest forests in the world, which would result in his second work, Wildwood (2007); book that, unfortunately, was published posthumously, since Deakin died a year earlier, just after handing in the manuscript, of a brain tumor. Throughout his life he wrote numerous articles for newspapers and magazines, including The Daily Telegraph and BBC Wildlife, and was co-founder of Common Ground, an organization that seeks to promote people's engagement with their local environment. In 2008, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm appeared, a compendium of the most interesting fragments of Deakin's diaries about his life in the countryside, co-edited by his partner, Alison Hastie, and the critic and novelist Terence Blacker.