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Reading lists

The best books that explore how nature benefits our mental health

A collection of Richard Mabey's books on a botanical background.

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Features

Where to start reading Richard Mabey

We are living in a golden age of nature writing, and books about the great outdoors are flourishing. 

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The best books for nature lovers

Birds Britannica

Now in its second edition with a new introduction by Helen Macdonald, a unique, beautiful, comprehensive cultural and social study, species by species, of all the birds in Britain. A companion volume to Flora Britannica and Bugs Britannica

Birds are inextricably entwined with British life 
 
British customs, more than 1,000 years of English literature and even the landscape itself, have all been enhanced by the presence of birds. This superb book pays tribute to the remarkable relationship forged between a nation and its most treasured national heritage. Birds Britannica concentrates on our social history and on the cultural links between humans and birds. 
 
What makes Birds Britannica special is the inclusion of observations and experiences from more than 1,000 naturalists and bird lovers. These contributions from the public touch on avian ecology; the lore and language of birds; their myths, the art and literature they have inspired; birds as food; and the crucial role they play in our sense of place and the changing seasons. 
 
No other book has dealt so completely with the rich connections between birds and humans; Birds Britannica captures the very essence of that relationship and explores why birds matter and why we care. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HELEN MACDONALD, SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF H IS FOR HAWK

Richard Mabey (Author) Richard Mabey is the father of modern nature writing in the UK. Since 1972 he has written some forty influential books, including the prize-winning Nature Cure, Gilbert White: a Biography, and Flora Britannica. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Vice-President of the Open Spaces Society. 
 
He spent the first half of his life amongst the Chiltern beechwoods, and now lives in Norfolk in a house surrounded by ash trees. Mark Cocker (Author) Mark Cocker is an author and naturalist whose fourteen books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and won the New Angle Prize for Literature in 2009. A Claxton Diary won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2019, and his most recent book, One Midsummer’s Day, was shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Award 2023. Helen Macdonald (Introducer) Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, naturalist and historian of science. Their books include H is for Hawk, which won many prizes including the Costa Book of the Year and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and the Sunday Times bestselling Vesper Flights. They live in Suffolk with their two parrots.

The British love their birds, which are inextricably entwined with every aspect of their island life. British customs, more than 1,000 years of English literature, the very fabric of society, even the landscape itself, have all been enhanced by the presence of birds. Highly acclaimed on first publication, this superb book pays tribute to the remarkable relationship forged between a nation and its most treasured national heritage. 
 
Birds Britannica is a unique publication of immense importance. Neither an identification guide nor a behavioural study (although both these subjects enter its field), it concentrates on our social history and on the cultural links between humans and birds. 
 
What makes Birds Britannica of special significance is the inclusion of observations and experiences from more than 1,000 naturalists and bird lovers. These contributions from the public touch on avian ecology; the lore and language of birds; their myths, the art and literature they have inspired; birds as food; and the crucial role they play in our sense of place and the changing seasons. 
 
Birds Britannica took eight years to research and was assembled by a team that included some of the finest writers and image-makers of British wildlife. On one level, it is a remarkable collection of humorous stories, field observations and tales of joy, wonder and occasional woe; on another, it is a nationwide chronicle. Scholarly and wide-ranging, a mix of the traditional and the contemporary, Birds Britannica is a comprehensive record of birdlife in the early years of the twenty-first century. No other book has dealt so completely with the rich connections between birds and humans; Birds Britannica captures the very essence of that relationship, and explores why birds matter and why we care.

The Uses and Abuses of Plants

Fencing Paradise

Triggered by visits to the Eden Project, Britain's foremost countryside writer is on top form as he discusses specific plants, plant hunters, what we mean by Paradise, and other botanical and ecological ideas.

Fluid and highly readable, Fencing Paradise is environmentally aware, but never preachy. Mabey dips into a broad pool of knowledge...to offer a panoramic depiction of our attempts to tame nature, and a cautionary vision of the possible consequences.

Mabey's lucid and very erudite "pot-pourri of responses, recollections and free associations" was sparked off by three seasons' worth of visits to the Eden Project.  The ambitious scale of that massive hothouse umbrella is reflected in the breadth of his contemplation.

A remarkable, beautifully written, exquisite book on botanical and ecological ideas, inspired by visits to the Eden Project.  Subtitled "The Uses and Abuses of Plants", it's a gem.

A terrific book...it's an engaging compendium of plant chat and history.

The author structures his book with a journey through the biotopia of the Eden Project in Cornwall, from where he darts off in history and geography to offer sparkling mini-essays on specific herbs and plants and more general matters botanical and ecological.

Even if you're not especially interested in the Eden Project, there is plenty here to fascinate. Mabey's writing is richly evocative, his breadth of reference enormous.

Fencing Paradise is nothing like a guide to the place, but to read it while visiting the Eden Project is the equivalent of adding clotted cream to strawberries.

In this remarkable journal of visits to Eden, Mabey transports his reader from Cornwall to the Mediterranean to the Tropics, from Old World to New, from present to personal memory, to new perspectives on our collective artistic and emotional past. Sensuous and evocative, exquisitely written, his new book challenges the reader to look differently at the world, and our place in the landscape. At the same time, Mabey is controversial in his views about what we mean by buzz words like 'renewable', or 'sustainable', and he is highly provocative in his final response to the Eden Project itself.

Nature Cure

'Britain's greatest living nature writer' (The Times) describes how he conquered clinical depression through his re-awakened love of nature.

A brilliant, candid and heartfelt memoir...The account of how he broke free of depression, reshaped his life and reconnected with the wild becomes nothing short of a manifesto for living...Mabey's particular vision, informed by a lifetime's reading and observation, is ultimately optimistic. It is also what makes his voice so appealing amid all the froth and flam of the eco-debate

A book of which only he could have written a single page...marvellously observed, deeply felt from sentence to sentence. The writing is exquisite

Rich, invigorating and deeply restorative

Nature Cure moves between the nervous breakdown of an individual and the madness of the modern world with a prescience akin to that of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Mabey is a radical, inheritor of an old English tradition...The core of the book is his exploration of his new landscape. It feels a privilege to share it, watching him unpick the layers of watery Norfolk, with dazzling skill and the warmest of hearts, as his troubled mind heals

Written in the radiant, tingle-making prose that has earned Mabey literary prizes and a multitude of fans... both a wake-up call and an example of how the love of nature can electrify and heal the imagination.

Britain's greatest living nature writer

Richard Mabey is the father of modern nature writing in the UK. Since 1972 he has written some forty influential books, including the prize-winning Nature Cure, Gilbert White: a Biography, and Flora Britannica. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Vice-President of the Open Spaces Society. 
 
He spent the first half of his life amongst the Chiltern beechwoods, and now lives in Norfolk in a house surrounded by ash trees.

'Britain's greatest living nature writer' The Times 
 
Rediscover the extraodinary power of nature and the British wilderness, from award-winning naturalist and author Richard Mabey 
 
In the last year of the old millennium, Richard Mabey, Britain's foremost nature writer, fell into a severe depression. The natural world – which since childhood had been a source of joy and inspiration for him – became meaningless. 
 
Then, cared for by friends, he moved to East Anglia and he started to write again. Having left the cosseting woods of the Chiltern hills for the open flatlands of Norfolk, Richard Mabey found exhilaration in discovering a whole new landscape and gained fresh insights into our place in nature. 
 
Structured as intricately as a novel, a joy to read, truthful, exquisite and questing, Nature Cure is a book of hope, not just for individuals, but for our species. 
 
'A brilliant, candid and heartfelt memoir...how he broke free of depression, reshaped his life and reconnected with the wild becomes nothing short of a manifesto for living...Mabey's particular vision, informed by a lifetime's reading and observation, is ultimately optimistic' Sunday Times

The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford

Dreams of the Good Life

Terrific . . . what makes Mabey's appreciation of Lark Rise's shape-shifting so compelling is that he never makes the mistake of thinking that the original was summoned up by some act of the collective unconscious. Instead, he reminds us of Thompson's awkward and patient achievement, as the sole creator of a bona fide work of art

It seems unlikely we shall ever get closer to the woman who wrote Lark Rise to Candleford

Dreams Of The Good Life is a gem of a book, small, perfectly formed, informative and, as his title suggests, dreamy

Richard Mabey is the acclaimed author of some thirty books, including Gilbert White, which won the Whitbread Biography Award in 1986, Flora Britannica (1995), winner of a National Book Award, and Nature Cure (2005), which was short-listed for three major literary awards, the Whitbread, Ondaatje, and J.R. Ackerley prizes. He writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and Granta, and contributes frequently to BBC radio. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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.

25 years of personal reflections on nature

A Brush With Nature

Reflections on the Natural World

A stunning evocation of our natural world, from 'Britain's greatest living nature writer' (The Times).

A golden evocation of flora and fauna, places, people and perspectives.

Getting hold of Brush With Nature in early March was like being given an unseasonable spell of warm weather in which everything in the natural world suddenly bursts into life ... Each [essay] feels like an outing, a trip with a supremely knowledgeable yet unpompous guide to somewhere new and fascinating.

Mabey's head is filled with the sights and sounds of exploration but also with the background hum of politics, science, poetry and prose, social history and the experiences of other amateur and professional ramblers. In these essays, Mabey is generous and inclusive, the mark of a rounded writer and man.

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.

The Drama of Woodland Change

The Ash and The Beech

A timely new edition of Richard Mabey's profound and poetic book, Beechcombings, now updated with a new foreword and afterword by the author

Wonderfully subversive, far-reaching and unsentimental

Richard Mabey is a man for all seasons, most regions and every kind of landscape

An elegant and heartfelt essay on mankind's changing relationship with trees

A leaf-storm of philosophical musings, journeys of mind and body, reflections and anecdotes that imprint the tree on human culture

A terrific combination of both natural and intellectual history, informed by penetrating insight

This is the book of range and ambitions that his many admirers hoped he would write. Refreshing, droll, politically alert, occasionally self-mocking, he has the enviable ability both to write historical overview and also to slip into the woods like a dryad, bringing us back to the trees themselves, their colours and lights and textures

A characteristically rich and individual mix of history, natural science, folklore, poetry, politics and personal observation... Mabey's writing is a brilliant in its minutely observed detail as in its broad sweeps

As always, Mabey's thoughts make compelling reading... This is a book by a man who doesn't just know, but understands trees

It's a scientific, historical, poetic account written in a quietly humorous, thoughtful style

He found his best form as a storyteller and interpreter of the dynamic nature of our native woodlands.

An informative history of the English relationship with trees

Elegant and heartfelt… Part eco-memoir, part monograph, wholly engrossing

Richard Mabey is the father figure of modern nature writing in the UK. Since 1972 he has written some 40 influential books, including the prize-winning Nature Cure, Gilbert White: a Biography, and Flora Britannica. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Vice-President of the Open Spaces Society. 
 
He spent the first half of his life amongst the Chiltern beechwoods, and now lives in Norfolk in a house surrounded by ash trees.

From ash die-back to the Great Storm of 1987 to Dutch elm disease, our much-loved woodlands seem to be under constant threat from a procession of natural challenges. Just when we need trees most, to help combat global warming and to provide places of retreat for us and our wildlife, they seem at greatest peril. But these dangers force us to reconsider the narrative we construct about trees and the roles we press on them. 
 
In this now classic book, Richard Mabey looks at how, for more than a thousand years, we have appropriated and humanised trees, turning them into arboreal pets, status symbols, expressions of fashionable beauty - anything rather than allow them lives of their own. And in the poetic and provocative style he has made his signature, Mabey argues that respecting trees' independence and ancient powers of survival may be the wisest response to their current crises. 
 
Originally published with the title Beechcombings, this updated edition includes a new foreword and afterword by the author.

Recipes, Tips and Other Improvisations in the Kitchen

Wild Cooking

Sequel to the bestselling Food For Free, Wild Cooking is about making-do and the sheer fun of inventive cooking.

Mabey has been described as "Britain's greatest living nature writer" and he brings equal authority to writing about food in this engaging memoir cum recipe book

The frugality of its recipes is offset by the gloriousness of its prose. This is the man who brought us Food For Free, so there's nothing about making do that he doesn't know - this book's a delight

Excellent... More than just a recipe book. It covers a useful skill in a downturn, the art of foraging

Learn the art of culinary busking with home-grown staples in this spirited and hands-on guide

A book for both the ecologically anxious and thrify, and since that means virtually everyone in Britain these days, it should sell by the truckload

Although not intended as a sequel to Food for Free, The Full English Cassoulet is similarly easy-going and personable... It manages to be both warmly eccentric and timely

Recommended Christmas gift for budding chefs and bon viveurs... Inventive cooking using things in every which way

There aren't many people who know how to make a "passable imitation of Corsican cheese" using nothing but milk, a couple of lemons and a pair of old tights. Then again, there aren't many writers like Richard Mabey, most lovable of naturalists. Ever since he first instructed us on the wonders of weeds in Food for Free, Mabey has shown himself alert to possibilities in nature that most of us are deaf to... Cooking methods are dealt with in a far more authoritative manner than in many a grander recipe collection'

The critic, conservationist and botanist Richard Mabey looks at how to make do in the kitchen by using local and seasonal food to their full potential. This book includes recipes and cooking advice with anecdotal stories and sketches to accompany them

This is a helpful, down-to-earth book with some lovely ideas in it

Mabey is a natural forager, and he describes the process of cooking with a sort of purity and simplicity

Among Richard Mabey's acclaimed publications are Food for Free (his first book and never out of print), Gilbert White (Whitbread Biography of the Year) and the ground-breaking bestseller Flora Britannica, which won the British Book Awards' Illustrated Book of the Year and the Botanical Society of the British Isles' President's Award and was runner-up for the BP Natural World Book Prize. He collaborated on Birds Britannica (which was his idea) and Nature Cure, described as 'A brilliant, candid and heartfelt memoir', had such wide appeal that it was shortlisted for no fewer than four prestigious prizes: the Whitbread Biography, the J.R. Ackerley for autobiography, Mind (for its investigation into depression) and the Ondaatje Prize for the evocation of the spirit of place. 
 
Richard Mabey was born and brought up among the beech woods of the Chilterns, and now lives in Norfolk.

Sequel to the cult bestseller Food For Free, Wild Cooking is about making-do and the sheer fun of inventive cooking. 
 
 Richard Mabey's sparky, offbeat book is about canny and inventive making-do, or 'busking in the kitchen'. 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, he encourages us to be daring and imaginative in our cooking and our approach to food. 
 
Although it contains wonderful, mouth-watering recipes like broad bean hummus, pumpkin soup and fillet-steak hearts this is more than a recipe book - it is a guide to a whole new way of thinking that embraces scrumping, celebrates picnics, and revels in saving energy wherever it can, whether that's by one-pot feasts or cooling on car radiators. After all, if you care about food 'life's too short not to stuff a mushroom'. 
 
Previously published in hardback as The Full English Cassoulet. 
 
 ‘Learn the art of culinary busking with home-grown staples in this spirited and hands-on guide’ Daily Mail

Making Do In The Kitchen

The Full English Cassoulet

Sequel to the bestselling FOOD FOR FREE, Richard Mabey's new book is about making-do and the sheer fun of inventive cooking. Mabey himself describes it as 'busking' in the kitchen and 'life's too short NOT to stuff a mushroom'

Richard Mabey is a prize-winning writer and botanist, described by The Times as 'Britain's greatest living nature writer'. Brought up in the Chilterns, he now lives in Norfolk where he and his partner, Polly, have created from scratch a vegetable garden, a Mediterranean garden, a pond garden and a wild garden with fields and hedgerows. 
 
Highly praised for his poetic style and his challenging ideas, he is the author of FOOD FOR FREE, THE UNOFFICIAL COUNTRYSIDE, THE COMMON GROUND, FLORA BRITANNICA, NATURE CURE and, most recently, BEECHCOMBINGS.

Richard Mabey began experimenting with cooking as soon as he was big enough to clamber to the cupboard where the powdered chocolate was kept. At scout camp he learned how to cook a Sussex Pond Pudding in a billy-can, and thirty years ago he permanently broadened the nation's palate with his guide to edible wild plants, Food For Free. His new book is a joyous exploration of local ingredients, broadening your horizons by travelling, vernacular heritage, and making use of everything except, as the saying goes, 'the pig's squeal'. 
It includes: 
*Collecting Corsican chestnut receipes and American mushroom ideas, and meditating on what a forest-food culture would have been like; 
* Cooking eggs in nothing but the sun; 
* Making bread the prehistoric way - with old beer; 
* Exploring the outer limits of apple cusine (i.e. 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; re-introducing his father's passion for offals.

Flora Britannica

The definitive new guide to wild flowers, plants and trees

A page-turner. He seamlessly weaves together the cultural and social history of wild plants… Undoubtedly the most fascinating book I own

Flora Britannica covers the native and naturalised plants of England, Scotland and Wales, and, while full of fascinating history, is topical and modern. Indeed, Flora Britannica is the definitive contemporary flora, an encyclopaedia of living folklore, a register – a sort of Domesday Book. 
 
 
It is unique in that it is not a botanical flora but a cultural one – an account of the role of wild plants in social life, arts, custom and landscape. It is also unique in that information has been supplied by the people themselves. Five years of intensive original research have aroused popular interest and ‘grassroots’ involvement on an exceptional scale. People all over Britain – both rural and urban – have been encouraged to record and celebrate the cultural dimensions of their own flora, and to send their memories and anecdotes, observations and regional knowledge to Flora Britannica. 
 
 
The result is a nationwide record of the popular culture, domestic uses and social meanings of our wild plants. It is both useful and delightful – superbly written by one of the most outstanding English authors on natural history and illustrated with nearly 500 photographs. Including trees and ferns, it covers 1,000 species, many of them in considerable detail. A new flora for the people, Flora Britannica is a testimony to the continuing relationship between nature and human beings, and a celebration that the seasons and the landscape, local character and identity, still matter in Britain.

Richard Mabey

Richard Mabey is among the best writers at work in Britain.  I don't  mean among the best nature writers, I mean the best writers, full stop.   I would read anything he wrote, but if such a thing as nature writing  exists and flourishes today it is thanks almost entirely to him.  I have  lived by his books for all of my life.  Pretty much all of what nature  means to me, I know thanks to his own lifelong clear-eyed but loving  investigation of what it means to him.  He has allowed us all to think  about modern nature – our world - but also, crucially, to feel it too.  I  cannot imagine a truer green man.

One figure, like no other, looms large in setting the ground for the contemporary form that has come to be called then New Nature Writing. Richard Mabey is an author whose work has consistently pioneered new ways of thinking about landscape, nature, place, culture and the range of interconnections that all of these share. Often this has meant reminding us of old ways of thinking about these things but he has always had a sharp eye for the new meanings our modern context provokes.

One of our most influential writers on the natural world

Poised where nature meets culture, he [Richard Mabey] is knowledgeable, politically savvy and wry, and an excellent naturalist

A vintage collection that shows the evolution of his [Mabey’s] thinking, perfect for chilling out

A life writing about nature

'One of our greatest nature writers' Guardian 
 
For over fifty years, Richard Mabey has been a pioneering voice in modern nature writing. This book collects pieces across his rich career, tracing his continually evolving ideas as much as the profound changes in our environment. From the rediscovery of food foraging in the 1970s, to reflections on the musicality of birdsong, these essays show Mabey's passionate belief that our planet is a commonwealth for all species, and that our reconnection with the living world is more vital than ever. 
 
'Richard Mabey is among the best writers at work in Britain' Tim Dee 
 
'Poised where nature meets culture, [Mabey] is knowledgeable, politically savvy and wry, and an excellent naturalist' New Statesman

Richard Mabey

Praise for Turning the Boat for Home

Richard Mabey is among the best writers at work in Britain. I don't mean among the best nature writers, I mean the best writers, full stop. I would read anything he wrote, but if such a thing as nature writing ...

One figure, like no other, looms large in setting the ground for the contemporary form that has come to be called then New Nature Writing. Richard Mabey is an author whose work has consistently pioneered new ways ...

One of our most influential writers on the natural world

Richard Mabey is among the best writers at work in Britain. I don't mean among the best nature writers, I mean the best writers, full stop. I would read anything he wrote, but if such a thing as nature writing ...

One figure, like no other, looms large in setting the ground for the contemporary form that has come to be called then New Nature Writing. Richard Mabey is an author whose work has consistently pioneered new ways ...

One of our most influential writers on the natural world

Richard Mabey is among the best writers at work in Britain. I don't mean among the best nature writers, I mean the best writers, full stop. I would read anything he wrote, but if such a thing as nature writing ...

One figure, like no other, looms large in setting the ground for the contemporary form that has come to be called then New Nature Writing. Richard Mabey is an author whose work has consistently pioneered new ways ...

One of our most influential writers on the natural world

Books by Richard Mabey

Articles featuring Richard Mabey

The best books that explore how nature benefits our mental health

Where to start reading Richard Mabey

The best books for nature lovers

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