These days with wild food ever more popular, the leaves are sometimes served in sandwiches, being tastier than lettuce, and used in mozarella pie, pizza, and, fried as crisps. Dandelions are also famous for being used to make wine and as a coffee substitute. The new nature writing spats, Mabey says, made them all acutely self-conscious. But later, over a glass of white wine, sitting outside for a coronavirus-age, al fresco lunch, he adds, “What I will say is that in much modern nature writing there is a tendency to view the natural world as a kind of magic globe in which to view oneself. I judged a competition recently and out of 30 or so entries just two were about the natural world and the rest were about the people who had written them.”

Flora Britannica : Mabey, Richard, 1941- : Free Download

Had his mother read much of his work by the time she died? “She read some of it. But I wish I’d been more confident about her. She was a not-well-read, working-class woman,” he is pushing the words past a lump in his throat, “and I undervalued that bit of her, and that’s bad.” The flora of India largely reflect the country’s distribution of rainfall. Tropical broad-leaved evergreen and mixed, partially evergreen forests grow in areas with high precipitation; in successively less rainy areas are found moist and dry deciduous forests, scrub jungle, grassland, and desert vegetation. Coniferous forests are confined to the Himalayas. There are about 17,000 species of flowering plants in the country. The subcontinent’s physical isolation, caused by its relief and climatic barriers, has resulted in a considerable number of endemic flora.

India forms an important segment of what is known as the Oriental, or Sino-Indian, biogeographic region, which extends eastward from India to include mainland and much of insular Southeast Asia. Its fauna are numerous and highly diverse. Mammals

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A Small Tortoiseshell butterfly feeding on a Dandelion. This butterfly needs help – it is in rapid decline. (Photo courtesy of @CreweCitizen) Richard Mabey is to botany what Elizabeth David is to cookery, a lyrical inspirer of enthusiasm and interest.” Mabey’s mother signed his paperwork for Oxford University. At 18, in 1959, he applied for biochemistry, unaware of what the degree involved but seduced by the grandeur and scope of the “bio” part. He switched to politics, philosophy and economics, the degree of the modern Westminster politician, after writing a letter to the department on 16 sides of Basildon Bond. He attended the lectures of Isaiah Berlin (“3,000 people crammed in the theatre. He’d direct his words to the top right of the crowd”) and had moral philosophy tutorials under Iris Murdoch, “who was very relaxed and more interested in talking about CND [the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament]”.He is always at the centre of the disputes, but generally as a barometer of how to do it well. “What strikes me still about Richard’s writing are three qualities,” MacFarlane tells me. “A deep natural-historical knowledge, especially in terms of flora; the profound tenderness and compassion that he extends towards the more-than-human world; and the brilliant analytical capacity that often sets him thinking against the grain. He is a proper field naturalist, an ecological ethicist, a superb stylist, and – in today’s parlance – a disrupter. That’s a unique mix.” The couple moved to a friend’s house nearby, before taking on the farmhouse. Mabey recorded his return to health, and his psychological shift from one landscape to another, in Nature Cure – a book he describes as a “coming of age story, rather late in life”. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth In his ability to look very hard, and very closely, at the natural world, Mabey has something in common with Andrew Marvell, whose retreat to a Yorkshire country house after the execution of Charles I produced two years of startling nature poetry. Marvell derives terrific energy from the act of looking, in the knowledge he will never truly be one with his surroundings. There is more at work in his poems than solace, or escape. As a young man Mabey was inspired by JA Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), a dazzling study of the bird written from a place of personal obsession, and by Kenneth Allsop’s columns in the Sunday Times. But the “new nature writing” – that bestselling form with its intense first-person narrations – would probably not exist without him. They weren’t ready to take the real jump and portray the natural world in the messy way that a) it is, and b) we perceived it,” he says. “They’re still very fond of humans knowing all the answers. The idea of Keats’s negative capability, of creative uncertainty – they did not find exciting.”