A Brush With Nature: Reflections on the Natural World

by Richard Mabey

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





Peppered throughout with references to the heritage of nature writing, and great writers from Richard Jefferies and John Clare to Roger Deakin and Robert MacFarlane, A Brush With Nature is part memoir, part nature journal, part social history, giving us a unique insight into a nature lover's reflections over a quarter of a century.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, Natural History, Essays, Audiobook

243 pages, Paperback

First published February 14, 2010

About the author

Richard Mabey is one of England's greatest nature writers. He is author of some thirty books including Nature Cure which was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Ondaatje and Ackerley Awards.

A regular commentator on the radio and in the national press, he is also a Director of the arts and conservation charity Common Ground and Vice-President of the Open Spaces Society. He lives in Norfolk.

Reviews

[Omi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I 'read' this book in the form of audiobook.

An interesting and brilliant collection of articles or essays perhaps of nature writings, some of which have been featured in publications over the 25 years. I read BBC Wildlife magazine (a publication Mabey writes for) but I've never really absorbed much of what he was trying to say. Listening to this book definitely helped me appreciate the message behind the writing, often politically motivated, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I'm going to listen to it again, dip in and out making records of the books, authors, and naturalists he mentions in hope to expand my reading into this genre of nature writing.

I loved this book.

[Sophy H · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love the writing of Richard Mabey.

His words flow naturally and the enthusiasm for his subject just jumps off the pages and grabs you. His love of nature is so assured and infallible.

I devour his books with absolute satisfaction.

This volume of articles from 25 years of nature writing is an unadulterated gem.

Beautiful.

[Mila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply fascinating and full of food for thought. Here is one of the essays in it's entirety - it's that good.

Tree-Planting 2005
It is, as I write, the season for tree-planting. All over the country, on roadsides, village greens, school playgrounds and abandoned fields, saplings are being reverently set in rows. Children are gathering basketfuls of acorns, hazelnuts and haws, and are sowing them in little pots on classroom windowsills. It is our great annual ritual of reparation, a token of our desire to make amends.
Yet do we ever pause to think rationally about this curious rite, about what it does to the land and to the attitudes of the planters? Trees, after all, grow quite naturally in our climate and succeeded in foresting Britain long before Plant a Tree Week was invented. Turn your back on a piece of land, and it is, in a few years, a wood. Much of the activity of farmers, developers and nature conservation managers is, precisely, the killing of trees, for their impertinent insistence on growing where they like. Agriculture - and civilization itself - are founded on a constant battle against incipient forest regeneration. Yet with our green hats on, we seem to doubt trees' biological ability to reproduce themselves.
Perhaps the best that can be said about planting is that it's more important symbolically than ecologically, that the planted trees become visible monuments to the dedication of a piece of ground to a woodland. At its most damaging, it is pure PR, a cliched gesture of correct intentions by politicians and corporate bodies. The Woodland Trust, one of the biggest planters in the country, privately admits it would like to see more natural tree growth, but does not think its members would tolerate years of scrubby young seedlings on its holdings. They want instant woods, woods as responsive to human intervention as a herbaceous border.
What must humouring this attitude do to people's view of nature's independence, especially children's? Doesn't it simply reinforce the ancient heresy - one of the root causes of our environmental problems - that nature is subservient, incapable of surviving without our assistance? And, more practically, what does it do to the planted land, stuffed full of often random assortments of saplings in ordered rows? Are these really trees, or a kind of living signpost, put there for our self-gratification?
Every time we're tempted to plant a tree anywhere that isn't a garden, we should go and meditate on one that has grown of its own accord. Go and look at a so-called 'derelict' hedge, at the mazy growth of the upward shoots from the knotty horizontals, at the give and take of the trees. Then look at after it's been dug out by one of the countryside agencies and replanted with nursery saplings. Go to a wood hit by the 1987 hurricane, and compare the neat rows of planted beeches with the teeming sheaves of naturally sprung maples and ashes, all in places and patterns they have chosen themselves. Go to the New Forest, and see how the new generation of self-sprung forest trees - oak and beech principally - grow through and are protected by thickets of holly and gorse, known locally as 'holms' or 'hats'. Look, too at an old tree untouched by tree surgeons and branch-pruners. Look at its body language, the natural balancing of the branches, the scars where limbs have been shed, the generous, conciliatory shapes of the healing tissue: what we describe, anthropomorphically, as damage or degeneration may be nothing of the kind. But most of all, just go to any patch of 'waste' land (a set-aside field will do) - the kind of land usually chosen for tree-planting - and count the tree seedlings already there. Why are we so contemptuous, so untrusting of them? Why do we prefer our trees, rather than wild trees which have sprung naturally in positions which suit them, and whose survival potential is a good sight better, despite a few years of entirely natural accompaniment by brambles and weeds? The honest answer, I fear, might not be very complimentary to us.
The conservation of wildness is the blind spot in the 'wild'-life conservation business in this country. Except in a few token 'non-intervention zones', it simply isn't considered. We're eager to conserve species, carefully defined habitats, that mysterious collective known as 'biodiversity', and all our human designs and ambitions for the biosphere. But not that untamed, inventive energy that makes nature different from a suburban park. The wisest, most reliable and most respectful way of establishing trees (in places where they are wanted) is simply to allow those that spring up naturally to continue.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Mabey is one of the most celebrated of British nature writers. This volume is his own selection from his columns in the BBC Wildlife magazine which I was shocked to learn is already 25 years old.

It's a beautifully produced book - one of those which satisfies merely by being held in the hand and the cover illustrations are just perfect. I like the way he has set out his selections in themes 'Roots', 'Wings', 'Words', 'Issues' and so on - and these themes show the breath of his writing, grounded though it always is in nature. He implicitly invites us to become aware of how he recycles words by choosing columns on the same subjects a decade or more apart.

I found myself envying not only his knowledge but also his lifestyle - both probably harder won than he lets on here.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short articles written for the BBC Wildlife Magazine covering a wide range of topics. I enjoyed the author's opinions, rooted in his love of the natural world, and based on his direct observations. His hands on approach, with descriptions of his personal experiences of nature, will resonate with anyone who enjoys a walk in the countryside. It gives credibility to his views which often challenge convention. The natural world is there to be enjoyed, cherished and ideally to be left to its own devices rather than subject to the meddlesome initiatives of conservation bodies and the like. A refreshing approach and relevant to the ongoing debate about how we meet the challenges of climate change.

[Suzie Grogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took a long time to read this book - you can't gobble it up, you have to savour each piece. Mabey writes stunning prose, and takes us into his heart, into his passionate engagement with the natural world. Wonderful stuff.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly lovely book.

[Joana · Rating 3 out of 5]

A selection of chronicals since the 80s to the late 00s. I read one or two each day, as it's not the kind of book you read in a sitting. It's very interesting how some of the older articles felt so fresh and how many of the things common people are starting to hear of now were already in the front row of nature lovers in the 80s. Sayings such as: think globally, act locally; dangers of greenwashing by the association of conservation to essentially "dirty" industries. It's also quite discouraging that these have been issues for so long and we're still seeing the same mistakes.

Anyway, there were some very good quotes here that I underlined and it was lovely to read about the nature encounters Mabey had. There were other sections that interested me less, such as the connections of the art world and literature to nature and a part of the chronicals that were quite theoretical. But I learned a lot. The most astonishing fact was that the international symbol of peace is actually a representation of a crane's foot.

[Antony Bellamy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent