By this time, she had separated from her husband and was living at Stillmeadow, a farmhouse built in 1690 in Southbury, Connecticut, sharing the house with Eleanor Sanford Mayer, a childhood friend who was often mistakenly identified as her sister. Beginning with Harvest at Stillmeadow (Little, Brown, 1940), Taber wrote a series of books about her simple life in New England that possessed homespun wisdom dolled out with earthy humor and an appreciation for the small things. She published more than 20 books related to Stillmeadow, including several cookbooks. James Galvin is best known for his poetry, and that poetic bent really comes through in both his dialogue and his artful word pictures of nature's beauty. He makes some striking comparisons that created powerful images for me, such as when he describes a sunset "turning the sky as many pastels as you see on the side of a rainbow trout." In this book, Iain Parkinson has carefully curated a fascinating collection of personal and evocative accounts shared by notable meadow experts from the world of science, conservation and the arts. The complex story of a hay meadow is told by the people whose lives are entangled within its intricate web, and in Meadow we hear over 30 first-person accounts touching on everything from wildflower and grassland restoration, basketmaking and weaving, pollinators and birdlife, water and soil, to hedgelaying, grazing, and archaeology.

I am having a hard time writing this review, because this book is so spare, so intricate, so spellbinding that I struggle to find the words to give even a minimal conception of the scope and breadth and depth of it. Other have done a better job than I ever could. connections to Kent Haruf's books, Train Dreams, Annie Proulx' western stories, Honey in the Horn, Angle of Repose, Housekeeping ... That being said, this was a magically lazy-river type of book. It takes you through the year by month starting in November when the family moved into an old homestead in Connecticut that was built in 1690. The charm and character of the place outside and in is beautifully described. Her thoughts are often poetic in nature. She tells fantastically of the nature around her. Taber has a positive, generous soul that reaches for light. She writes, "…I sometimes think that when people reach the day in which they see no good in anything different and new, on that day they begin to die. The will to live and the will to grow are the two foundation stones on which humanity is built. During all difficult days, I am determined to keep new interests going, lest I bog down in worry and anxiety. We need to use our time constructively, creatively, if possible" (209). Sound advice in this troubled spring.Helen Baczkowska of Norfolk Wildlife Trust is another meadow maker. Working with farmers, she is restoring lost meadows by re-seeding them with hay from roadside verges, virtually the last sanctuary for wildflowers in parts of lowland Britain. Plantlife urges people to sign up to “ No Mow May”. Ideally a wildflower meadow should be cut (with grass cuttings removed) in late summer. But creating a mosaic of long and short grass in a garden is best for diversity. Leave grass cuttings in a sunny corner for grass snakes.

Meadows are, as Dines puts it, “crucibles” of biodiversity. Up to 40 plant species are found in a square metre of chalk downland meadow. These plants support a tumult of other life; a typical suite of meadow plants provides food for 1,400 invertebrate species. “Pollinators such as bees are really important, but it’s the aphids, thrips, grasshoppers, bugs and beetles living on plant matter, that’s the real powerhouse of biodiversity in these areas.”Finished last night with this excellent book. The prose was lovely and NOT too poetic and vague, as I'd feared it might be. There is no plot to it, so don't expect that. That apple tree, if it still exists, has seen many more seasons. But here I am, two decades later, drawing again from the inner wealth of that chapter in my life. And as I read Gladys Taber today, I am once again entranced. Her nature descriptions are so evocative, so joyful. She tosses in her simple love for mankind, her kindly hopes for peace on earth (this particular book was written shortly after the end of WWII). Forbes Adam has since created a charity, the Woodmeadow Trust, which is advising more than a dozen other community groups and landowners on woodmeadow projects, from Yorkshire to London. “It’s really exciting that we are starting to inspire other people,” says Forbes Adam. “Our aspiration is a woodmeadow in every parish.” My eureka moment of believing we had done the right thing,” says Forbes Adam, “was when Meg Abu Hamdan, who records butterflies here, told me: ‘When I walk through the gate of Three Hagges, I step into my 25 acres of hope.’ And also when I held my first pygmy shrew, came across wood anemone flowering and saw my first marbled white butterfly.”

Even Trevor Dines, Plantlife’s botanical specialist, was taken by surprise when he created his own meadow on a small field he bought near his home in north Wales in 2015. The field had been what farmers traditionally describe as “improved” – its grass fertilised and grazed so intensively that delicate wildflowers disappeared. The field had about 20 species of plant. (Many intensively farmed grass fields are now sown with just one rye-grass species.) Dines stripped off this sward to expose the soil and spread fresh hay containing local wildflower seeds from a flower-rich meadow six miles away. This “natural seeding” technique has been a key principle of the coronation meadows, of which his is one. Stars. The only part I didn’t like was all the talk about her dogs. Which is fine, I’m just not a dog person. She certainly didn’t do it all of the time but when she did, I usually skimmed over most of that section. Add native yellow rattle seeds to lawns. The rattle parasitises the grass and enables other wildflowers to grow.

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This is a quiet, thoughtful read for those of us who have a strong heart connection with the high sagebrush country of the inter-mountain West. It follows about a century's-worth of people's doin's in a mountain meadow at 8,500 feet in southern Wyoming. The life requires great hardiness and ingenuity to withstand the isolation and trials of snow, wind, fire, hunger, disease, and financial uncertainty. If you don’t have a garden, join local groups (or your parish council) that manage parks, playing fields, church yards or school grounds. Encourage them to create pollinator strips or allow areas of long grass in summer. Many people still see long grass as untidy, but will be won over if it is filled with flowers and framed by short grass or mown paths. Lilacs make their own purple dusk all day, or lift dreamy clusters of pure pearl. Their scent is cool and mysterious. It is surely one of the most romantic smells—it reminds me of old deserted gardens where long-vanished ladies come again to walk in the moonlight. Mrs. Taber taught English at Lawrence College, Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and at Columbia University, where she did postgraduate studies. She began her literary career with a play, Lady of the Moon (Penn), in 1928, and followed with a book of verse, Lyonesse (Bozart) in 1929. Taber won attention for her first humorous novel, Late Climbs the Sun (Coward, 1934). She went on to write several other novels and short story collections, including Tomorrow May Be Fair ( Coward, 1935), A Star to Steer By (Macrae, 1938) and This Is for Always (Macrae, 1938). In the late 1930s, Taber joined the staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal and began to contribute the column “Diary of Domesticity.”