Nature Writing for Every Day of the Year

by Jane McMorland Hunter (Editor)

Enjoy a whole year of the very finest nature writing, with one carefully selected piece to savour every day.

This beautifully illustrated daily anthology brings you the very best of nature writing from around the world and through the centuries, from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History to modern authors such as Helen Macdonald and Robert Macfarlane. Encompassing fact and fiction, essays and field guides, letters and diaries, it’s a rich banquet of prose, the perfect companion to help your mind escape into the world of nature every day.

It contains descriptions of nature in all its Virginia Woolf on snails, Kenneth Grahame on the charms of a riverbank, Willa Cather on the rolling American prairies, and, via L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables on Octobers. David Attenborough pops up to talk about our responsibility to the natural environment, Edith Holden provides evocative descriptions from The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, and Henry David Thoreau, of course, sends dispatches from Walden Pond . We meet Rudyard Kipling’s jungle animals and Jack London’s wild dogs, and Mark Twain explains why a camel is not jumpable.

Keep this wonderful celebration of nature by your bedside and it will become the perfect start or close to each day of the year.

Genres: Nature, Poetry, Nonfiction

464 pages, Hardcover

First published October 14, 2021

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the selections in this! There’s an incredible variety and I got in the habit of reading them aloud because they’re short enough. I love how reading them aloud helped me savor them.

[Dr. des. Siobhán · Rating 5 out of 5]

As my wonky brain is not very good with short-term memory and remembering stuff, I haven't read all of the poems / short texts for every day of the year yet, but I still want to rate this book. I am not ashamed to say that this book is in my bathroom, which allows me to enjoy a very short poem when peeing. The selected nature writings are wonderful, I've found many new authors and texts that I want to check out in its entirety, so I highly recommend this novel (not only for your bathroom). :)

[Winny Wood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did like this book. It's really nicely illustrated and bound. I can't say I liked all of the readings though and thought some were odd choices. It wasn't quite as poetic as I thought it would be.

[Kelly Furniss · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vast collection of varied pieces of nature writing from around the World. Facts and fiction, poems, essays and field guides
Some days they will make you stop and think and other days you may be quite perplexed as they can be quite unusual. A good celebration of nature to see you through the year.

[Saturday's Child · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection had some lovely readings in it. If it were my own copy (and not the libraries) I would have read each day on the day instead of all of them over a few days.

[Deb Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like The Comfort of Crows, Nature Writing for Every Day of the Year is a beautifully illustrated literary devotional. The readings in this anthology are divided into monthly sections, each of which is titled in such a unique way.

The readings range from ancient writers like Pliny the Elder to more modern voices such as John Muir, Willa Cather and L. M. Montgomery. I usually read each day’s entry on the window seat in our loft, where I can just barely glimpse the little lake in our neighborhood just beyond the trail. This has been a comforting way to pause and reset each day.

Words I’m remembering, written by Richard Jefferies: “On approaching it this apparent cloud is found to consist of thousands of starlings, the noise of whose calling to each other is indescribable—the country folk call it a ‘charm,’ meaning a noise made up of innumerable lesser sounds, each interfering with the other. The vastness of these flocks is hardly credible until seen; in winter the bare trees on which they alight become suddenly quite black.”