Green Islands

In Green Islands, John Lewis-Stempel brings together the very best of British nature writing, from its Georgian beginnings to the present day to create a definitive collection. It comprises 100 prose pieces by Britain's greatest nature writers - men and women as varied as the poet John Clare, the scientist Dave Goulson and the diarist Dorothy Wordsworth. We travel from the Georgian beginnings of nature writing in the eighteenth century to the present golden age led by Robert Macfarlane, with the book's varied contents exploring the landscape of the isles from the ottered Orkneys to the corn buntings of Norfolk, the flora of the high mountains of Wales to the fishladders of the Thames. All of Britain's natural life is celebrated here. Green Islands is arranged into four seasonal sections so that the natural year unfolds as the reader progresses. It is a wonderful book for anyone who loves British nature and the glorious literature it has inspired. Contributors include Robert Macfarlane, Edward Thomas, Richard Jeffries, Helen Macdonald, Richard Mabey, Gilbert White, George Monbiot, George Orwell, Henry Williamson, John Clare, Dorothy Wordsworth, Alfred Wainwright, Peter Scott, Flora Thompson, Mark Cocker, Charles Darwin, George Ewart Evans, William Cobbett, Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, W. H. Hudson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Nan Shepherd, Kenneth Allsop, Laurie Lee, Charles Kingsley, Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, Oliver Rackham, Peter Scott, Gavin Maxwell, Patrick Barkham, John Stewart Collis, John Lister-Kaye, Patrick Barkham, H. E. Bates, Geoffrey Grigson, Ivor Gurney and Edward Grey.