Odes & Nightingales (words on nature each day of the year)

England is home to lots of lovely native wildlife, from songbirds to hibernating mammals to marine creatures. And in order to feel a passion to help them and their habitats, the best solution is to get to know them. Just as you would help a friend in need, once our wild neighbours become your friends, you will wish to help them too!

Odes and Nightingales is a gift book showing the language we use, to describe the natural world. Words like petrichor (the earthy smell of rain) to murmuration (aerial dances of starlings). In Japan there is ‘forest-bathing’, and in Norway there is ‘Friluftsliv’ whih translates as ‘free-air life’ when connecting with nature.

The natural world has inspired poets and writers through the centuries, and the phrases used are often what we bring to mind: Wordsworth ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’, Keats wrote his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Shakespeare ‘compared his muse to a summer’s day’.

Find extracts from some of our best loved nature poets and writers in including Robert Burns, Tennyson, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë.

Discover words from around the world including Inuit words for snow, to Japanese blossom viewing parties. And even the Icelandic custom of closing the office early on a sunny day!