England’s Natural World (stunning books to read)
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!
Robert Tuesley Anderson is a writer, poet and editor living in the Southern Uplands of Scotland.
Turning to Birds (sitting quiet, to listen to nature)
Turning to Birds looks at the eye-opening world of small moments, when you dare to just sit, listen and watch the natural world. Actor Lili Taylor decided to take a break from her work, to seek silence and song amid the world of birds around her.
Now more seen with pair of binoculars than an autocue, she writes beautifully crafted essays to share the encounters with birds that have captured her heart and imagination. From learning the virtual of patience in New Mexican (thanks to a quail) to experiencing a distant moment of connection with a woodcock in Ohio.
From the exhilaration of witnessing a migratory flock of birds from the top of New York’s Empire State Building, to the quiet joy of observing a nest of hatchlings in her own backyard.
Simply by paying attention to wild birds, Lili has witnessed a wide and deep world parallel to ours – one of constant change and movement, full of life and with a will to survive.
In this book, she encourages you too to be present and fully engaged with the natural world around her. Her lovely prose and meditations invite you to see our world with new eyes, and find joy in unexpected places.
Learn more on how to create safe havens for birds, and how to stop birds flying into windows.
Lili Taylor is an award-winning actress on Broadway. In the birding world, she is a board member of the National Audubon Society and New York City Audobon. She nests in Brooklyn and upstate New York with her husband, the poet Nick Flynn and their family.
Love is a Toad (a year long journey exploring wildlife)
Love is a Toad is a book where the author (who is fortunate enough to be blessed with the tremendous name of Lucy Lapwing!) traverses meadows, bogs and hedgerows with fellow nature enthusiasts, to dig down into our relationship with the natural world.
Over a year she meet blackbirds, slugs, dung beetles and toads. From a river swim to wanders through woodlands, she explores how nature makes us feel – from wild grief and anger, to soaring joy and hope. This is a prod at our connection to the natural world, exploring its complexity, in all its muddiness and messiness.
Lucy writes about nature the way we actually experience it – messy, moving, funny and deeply human. Love Is a Toad captures the feelings of being outdoors in a way I’ve rarely read before. It made me slow down, look closer, and feel more. Lucy has an extraordinary gift for turning small encounters into moments of wonder. Dr Amir Kahn
Lucy Lapwing grew up in West Lancashire, always fascinated by nature and wildlife. Now a wildlife campaigner, she works behind the scenes on BBC Springwatch. She lives on the Isle of Bute in Scotland.
The Secret (wild) Life of a Paris cemetery
The Secret Life of a Cemetery is the English translation of a best-selling book in France, when Benoît Gallot (curator at Père Lachaise in Paris) decided to pull back the curtains on his other-worldly workplace to discover a natural wildlife paradise – where foxes roam, birds flit between trees and wildflowers or moss encroach onto tombstones.
Born into a family of undertakers, Gallot manages 40 hectares of green space with 70,000 graves. Yet he also lives on the grounds with his young family, and provides insight into the history of graveyards.
Even though many people calls us ‘the Addams family’, neither our jobs nor the fact that we live in a cemetery have made us sad, let alone depressed. Unlike our apathetic neighbours, we are, on the contrary, determined to enjoy life to the fullest. Our children learned to ride bikes in paths lined with tombs. Like me, my four children are growing up a universe where death is omnipresent.
After six years of transformation to promote biodiversity, a family of foxes took up residence in Ivry Cemetery. You can imagine our pride! We took their arrival as the reward for our efforts to make the cemetery a place not only for the dead but also for life.
