- A Flower A Day, by Miranda Janatka (Batsford), is a hefty, colourful coffee table book, full of bite-sized chunks of information about a different a flower blooming somewhere in the world on each day, with photos and illustrations. Today, it’s Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) from North America and its medicinal properties. It would make a lovely present for anyone who loves flowers.
- Drought-Resistant Planting by Beth Chatto (Frances Lincoln), was publicised many years ago, but the lessons from this late, great plants woman’s gravel garden have never been more timely. I keep going back to it.
- Grey bees by Andrey Kurkov (Maclehose Press) is nothing really to do with bees but the protagonist is a beekeeper living in the Donetsk region between 2015 -2020. He loves his bees more than anything. It is the best novel I’ve read this year, other than Kurkov’s classic black satire, Death and the Penguin, about Ukraine in the 1990s.
- Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard (Penguin) is the real life story of the scientist some of you will recognise from the novel Overstory by Richard Powers whose discovery that trees ‘talked’ to each other and co-operated for survival was discredited by male academia for decades.
- Rachel Carson Cared About Our World by Kate Coombs and Seth Lucas (Gibbs Smith) is one of a series of BabyLit books introducing very young children to some of our great conservationists. I discovered the book in my local, independent bookshop and then looked online to find others in the series include John Muir and Beatrix Potter. It’s a US publisher, but you can get them here.
- I can’t mention children’s books without including Nan Eshelby’s entertaining and quirkily illustrated Maisie, Daisy and Mo series to save wildlife, including Bombus and the Beeline. (I should disclose that I have advised Nan on some of the bee facts.)
- Wild Fell: Fighting for Nature on a Lake District Hill Farm, by Lee Schofield (Transworld) “I found myself turning the pages with an inward leap of joy”, says Isabella Tree (author of Wilding) of Lee’s battle to persuade farmers around RSPB Haweswater to work with, not against, nature.
- Jake Fiennes’ Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside, – actually written beautifully by award-winning nature author, Tim Ecott – (Ebury) is in the same vein and equally important by showing farmers the small tweaks they can make and the positive impact it can have on nature.
- Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Dave Goulson (Penguin) out in paperback this year, is a compelling and essential read.
- Insectinside; life in the bushes of a small Peckham park, by Penny Metal, will always have a place in my top 10 because the amazing photos are a great way to start identifying not just bees, but hoverflies, wasps and other amazing insects we will all encounter if we just stop and pay a bit more notice to nature.
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland, by Steven Falk and Richard Lewington (Bloomsbury), is the bee bible that anyone series about trying to identify bees cannot be without.
Books of the year
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