A Brush With Nature: 25 years of personal reflections on the natural world

Review by Dick Warner

He’s probably best known for his book Food For Free, about gathering wild foods in the countryside.

His latest book is a selection of the articles he’s been writing for the BBC Wildlife Magazine since 1988. From the outset he had a clear mission statement for what these articles were going to achieve. He believes that there is a great tradition of literary writing about nature in Britain and that in recent times this has degenerated under the pressure from coffee-table books, television documentaries and ‘country diaries’.

This is an interesting notion. There’s no doubt that this tradition does exist in Britain, and also in the United States and Canada.

It’s not as evident in Ireland, though I suspect there is an Irish language tradition of writing about nature that’s not there in our English prose tradition.

Anyway, Mabey deliberately sets himself the daunting task of rectifying this modern deficit. He has selected his favourite articles and arranged them by theme into seven sections. The result is a book that is good in parts.

There’s no doubt that Mabey is a superb all-round naturalist. He is equally at home describing the hunting tactics of barn owls, the subtle differences between species of wild orchid or the dragonflies that abound around his home in the wetlands of East Anglia. He’s at his best when he’s writing about these things with authority and passion. This natural history writing is mostly contained in the first part of the book.

In the second half he has selected more didactic articles which are concerned with his theme of integrating the natural world and the worlds of culture and literature. There are articles about painting, about Shakespeare, about installation art and outdoor sculpture exhibitions. But the vocabulary of art criticism and the vocabulary of nature writing are very different and Mabey fails to reconcile the two.

Much of his art criticism is woolly thinking expressed in affected language. For example his description of an oil painting of a pair of toads: “a mysterious evocation of two muted creatures lost in a world of broad- brushed weeds and water swirls”. Or when he explains how Ode to a Nightingale, by John Keats, isn’t about a real bird. It’s about “the way the gift of consciousness can blight our experience of ‘the natural’ by making us too aware of its earthly limits”.

From the earlier part of the book I particularly liked an article on the joys of going for an aimless ramble in the countryside, an exercise he calls ‘pootling’. You cannot, apparently, claim to be pootling if you’re out walking the dog, trying to burn off calories, carrying watercolours and an easel, or being sponsored by anyone. It has to be walking purely for the joy of walking.

I think Mabey might have produced a better book if he’d asked an editor to select the articles rather than making the choices himself.