Vale of tares

‘Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ Nature writing used to be a subject for ridicule.

‘Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ Nature writing used to be a subject for ridicule. Evelyn Waugh, the arch sneerer, might have found it harder to parody the modern breed of literary naturalists.

Richard Mabey is perhaps the best known English author of recent fashionable books about the natural world. He belongs to a group of new naturalists which includes Robert Macfarlane the Cambridge don, Kathleen Jamie the poet, and the late Roger Deakin. They are all intellectuals, whose pitch is more observant and scientific than romantic. Wordsworth inspires them less than John Clare, whom Macfarlane once described as ‘a hider-away, a lane-haunter, a birds’-nester, a field-farer’. Unlike Clare, they are not labourers, but walkers and observers, and Mabey is so observant that he often resorts to a microscope to inspect a plant.