Outside he planted trees including in 2003 a line of walnuts that might take

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Outside he planted trees, including, in 2003, a line of walnuts that might take 40 years to bear fruit. He argued with the locals, again firm but polite, about ancient rights of way, and tried to convince the authorities and the neighbours that a coppiced hedgerow was just as important as a wood or forest, and should be preserved, not just as a bit of greenery, but evidence of a dynamic relationship with the environment that was once everyday and everywhere. Until last summer there was always a colony of visiting swallows in the main chimney and, for a year or two, he shared his kitchen with ducks and chickens. Apart from a sturdy Rayburn, and some rudimentary, and far from "mod" cons, Walnut Tree Farm was almost as Elizabethan the day he died there as when he first moved in: brick floors, wide open fireplaces, rough furniture, rugs, vines, creepers and, on wet days, mud. He would disappear for long weekends in his sky-blue Morgan (not always alone), until in 1968 he found the tumbling Elizabethan moated farmhouse on the edge of Mellis Common, and began an endless loving process of refurbishing it, restoring it, but never "renovating".

Deakin had that prize talent for combining a profound romantic imagination with boyish tinkering, and was drawn irrevocably to what people were still able to call "the country". In our narrow Bayswater kitchen was earthenware trove he had found in southern Spain, from Antonio Sala's kiln in a village near Gerona in Catalonia. He and his friend Tony Axon sold the bulk of them in the Portobello Road and since those days, Sr Sala has done very well selling much finer wares, as supplier of ceramics to the Queen - but his early work is still at Roger Deakin's home in Mellis. He strewed his room with driftwood, dried flowers, long-stemmed blond grasses, enamel roadside advertising signs for Camp Coffee or Mobiloil, defunct, but not to be buried, Remington typewriters, and bakelite phones. I once nearly chucked out some "dead" fronds and was told, wisely but firmly, that nothing was ever really dead, and anyway there was another way of seeing them now they no longer had the burden of growing. In his late teens, he was already a keen and courageous explorer of Europe. He was one of the first people I knew who would always check out the contents of a builder's skip, for useful or decorative objects which might make their way to his mantelpiece, his tool-box or a market stall.

While he stayed in advertising, becoming creative director at more than one smart London agency, he was a keen stripper of old pine - kitchen chairs, cabinets, corner cupboards, chests of drawers. In 1965, when I met Roger Deakin first, he lived on the third floor in one of the many four-storey, Bayswater cream-painted residential terraces. He had come down from Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he was tutored in English by Kingsley Amis, and been snapped up as a copywriter for Colman Prentis and Varley; but he had a natural, quite literally entrepreneurial spirit, which drove him to collect, remake and market all kinds of discarded treasures. Waterlog was as much about the people of the waterways as the water, whether they be swimmers, fisher-folk, lock-keepers, boat people, scientists or council minders. Deakin would often challenge the local protectors whose duty it was to warn off people from "unhealthy" or "dangerous" water.