RICHARD MABEY

While the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, Flora Thompson's much-loved portrait of life in the English countryside, has inspired a hit television series, relatively little is known about the author herself. In this highly original book, bestselling biographer and nature writer Richard Mabey sympathetically retraces her life and her transformation from a post-office clerk who left school at fourteen to a sophisticated professional writer. Revealing how a formidable imagination can arise from the humblest of beginnings, Dreams of the Good Life paints a poignant, unforgettable portrait of a working-class woman writer's struggle for creative expression.

Described as 'Britain's greatest living nature writer', the author has revealed his passion for the natural world in eloquent stories for BBC Wildlife Magazine. This title features his favourite pieces and presents a view of the changing natural landscape in which we live.

From ash die-back to the Great Storm of 1987, our much-loved woodlands seem to be under constant threat from a procession of natural challenges. The author reveals how we have appropriated and humanised trees, turning them into arboreal pets. She argues that respecting trees' independence may be the wisest response to their current crises.

" A] witty and beguiling meditation on weeds and their wily ways.... You will never look at a weed, or flourish a garden fork, in the same way again."--Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder"In this fascinating, richly detailed book, Richard Mabey gives weeds their full due."--Carl Zimmer, author of EvolutionRichard Mabey, Great Britain's Britain's "greatest living nature writer" (London Times), has written a stirring and passionate defense of nature's most unloved plants. Weeds is a fascinating, eye-opening, and vastly entertaining appreciation of the natural world's unappreciated wildflowers that will appeal to fans of David Attenborough, Robert Sullivan's Rats, Amy Stewart's Wicked Plants, and to armchair gardeners, horticulturists, green-thumbs, all those who stop to smell the flowers.

Ever since the first human settlements 10,000 years ago, weeds have dogged our footsteps. They are there as the punishment of 'thorns and thistles' in Genesis and , two millennia later, as a symbol of Flanders Field. They are civilisations' familiars, invading farmland and building-sites, war-zones and flower-beds across the globe. Yet living so intimately with us, they have been a blessing too. Weeds were the first crops, the first medicines. Burdock was the inspiration for Velcro. Cow parsley has become the fashionable adornment of Spring weddings. Weaving together the insights of botanists, gardeners, artists and poets with his own life-long fascination, Richard Mabey examines how we have tried to define them, explain their persistence, and draw moral lessons from them. One persons weed is another's wild beauty.

During the early 1970s Richard Mabey set about mapping his unofficial countryside. He walked crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb sites, navigating inner city canals and car parks, exploring sewage works, gravel pits, rubbish tips. What he discovered runs deeper than a natural history of our suburbs and cities. The Unofficial Countryside prescribes another way of seeing, another way of experiencing nature in our daily lives. Wild flowers glimpsed from a commuter train. A kestrel hawking above a public park. Enchanter's nightshade growing through pavement cracks. Fox cubs playing on a motorway's scrubby fringe. There is a scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. It is an inspiration to find this abundance, to discover how plants, birds, mammals and insects flourish against the odds in the most obscure and surprising places.

First prize winner in the Nature and Placecategory of the 2010 EDP/Jarrolds East Anglian Book Awards"So vividly written you can almost hear the song of these rare birds" - Kate Kellaway, The GuardianRichard Mabey, described as "Britain's greatest living nature writer", explores the nightingale's links with Suffolk culture and landscape, and traces the bird’s course through myth, lore and tradition. He plumbs his subject for its fascinating literary and historical references, and opens the reader's ears to the bird itself and its extraordinary song, a hymn to survival. New images by Derrick Greaves accompany the text.

Whether creating a cassoulet which uses English ingredients, making bread from chestnuts or slow-cooking a Peking duck in front of an ancient fan heater, this book encourages us to be daring and imaginative in our cooking and our approach to food.

the outer limit is making leather out of apples);* 'Cooking against the grain' - if we didn't have access to wheat, what could we make with nuts?* How to deal with gluts - those autumn mountains of beans and courgettes;* Making-do the wartime way - canny tricks his mother taught him;

'Britain's greatest living nature writer' The TimesRediscover the extraodinary power of nature and the British wilderness, from award-winning naturalist and author Richard MabeyIn the last year of the old millennium, Richard Mabey, Britain's foremost nature writer, fell into a severe depression.

A complete guide to help you safely identify edible species that grow around us, together with detailed artworks, field identification notes and recipes.

With more than two hundred editions, Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne is one of the most published books in the English language. An environmental study of the eighteenth-century Hampshire parish where White was born and later served as curate, the book is distinguished by the author’s meticulous observations of plant and animal life-the ""minute particulars""-and his uncanny sense of their interdependence. His book is both the definitive expression of the English love for countryside and a cornerstone of all environmental writing. In this Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Richard Mabey-whom the Times has called ""Britain’s foremost nature writer""-looks at the life from which the celebrated work grew. This is not an easy task. Although White’s findings did not go unnoticed in his own time (much of the Selborne book’s contents are in fact letters to Thomas Pennant, one of the era’s leading zoologists), relatively little is known about this minor clergyman, who made twenty pounds a year and rarely ventured outside his parish. Mabey visits not only the public and private records but the environs of Selborne, which survive to this day and are remarkably unchanged. A portrait of exceptional detail emerges, and we begin to see very clearly this singular man whose superb scientific eye was complemented by a patient curiosity (he valued observing over collecting) and an emotional investment in his work that still speaks to us. White typifies the eclectic but intense engagement that has nearly vanished in our era of scientific specialization. We recognize in his work a crucial shift in the human perception of nature-as something benign rather than as an adversary. The first U. S. edition of this classic biography coincides with a new BBC documentary on Gilbert White, for which Mabey is a featured commentator. These are only the latest reminders of the fascination White’s book has exercised upon readers for two centuries.

When the pioneering naturalist Gilbert White (1720-93) wrote The Natural History of Selborne (1789), he created one of the greatest and most influential natural history works of all time, his detailed observations about birds and animals providing the cornerstones of modern ecology. In this award-winning biography, Richard Mabey tells the wonderful story of the clergyman - England's first ecologist - whose inspirational naturalist's handbook has become an English classic.

The ideal portable companion, the world-renowned Collins Gem series returns with a fresh new look and updated material. This is the perfect pocket guide for aspiring foragers. Over 100 edible plants are listed, fully illustrated and described, together with recipes and other fascinating details on their use throughout the ages. Practical advice on how to pick along with information on countryside laws and regulations on picking wild plants helps you to plan your foray with a feast in mind. This is the ideal book for both nature lovers and cooks keen to enjoy what the countryside has to offer.

Indeed, Flora Britannica is the definitive contemporary flora, an encyclopaedia of living folklore, a register â?? a sort of Domesday Book. It is unique in that it is not a botanical flora but a cultural one â?? an account of the role of wild plants in social life, arts, custom and landscape.