For the love of the LAND
So where are the books that celebrate them?
STEP INTO ALMOST any British bookshop and you’ll find tables stacked high with nature books. Their covers are instantly recognisable: seagulls plummet from woodcut cliffs, treetops form a crownshy canopy, a huge-eyed owl spreads its watercolour wings. They cover everything from canals to birds to islands to flowers to one single acre of Yorkshire moors. There’s a competition dedicated to nature writing: the Wainwright Prize, launched in 2014. That ‘bastion’ of British popular culture, The Daily Mail, even ran a poll recently to discover Britain’s favourite nature book. That’s not surprising, because Britain is where nature writing was born (in the Western world at least).
In the Hampshire village of Selborne, the 18th-century parson Gilbert White was born, lived most of his life and died. He might have passed through the world entirely unremarked had it not been for his habit of writing detailed letters about the countryside he knew so well. These writings became the first modern nature book in English, The Natural History of Selborne, which was published in 1789 and has never been out of print since.
His observations provide a window into the natural world before the industrial revolution changed it forever.
It inspired Charles Darwin and revealed White’s deep respect for nature, which continues to influence those who love and write about it today.
White’s death in 1793 coincided with the dawn of the Romantic movement, whose focus on emotion, spontaneity and feelings of transcendence changed the way people thought and wrote about nature. Poets like William Wordsworth (1770–1850) (“I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o’er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd/A host, of golden daffodils”) arguably
