There’s another thing there that fascinates me,” he says. “Our dear leader actually uttered this phrase: ‘We must be humble in the face of nature.’ He was publicly declaring, in a way that I don’t think was fully comprehended, that the virus was part of nature. We were being reconnected with it on rather a large scale. We really need to think about what we mean by ‘nature’ much more seriously. It is such a glib word.” send us your photos of bees or other insects on dandelions (and don’t forget to say where they are from) – or share them on our social media It used to be common for people used to grow dandelions for winter salad and for chemists to turn into medicines. Dandelion leaves are rich in iron, potassium and zinc. Richard Mabey is to botany what Elizabeth David is to cookery, a lyrical inspirer of enthusiasm and interest.” Then there’s the more serious depression, which is not so much about me, but about the world, and I think that it’s creative – or at least, I hope it is – because I suppose I’m a bit of a contrarian about the idea that nature is always there to make you well.”

Flora Definition and Examples - Biology Online Dictionary Flora Definition and Examples - Biology Online Dictionary

Dandelions love outdoor sun and will close up and die if cut and put in a vase. The flowers close up on cold and cloudy days. the Garden Tiger moth used to be common in gardens – now it’s rarely seen. It’s ‘caterpillar’ eats Dandelions. (Photo credit Temple of Mara Creative Commons) A Small Tortoiseshell butterfly feeding on a Dandelion. This butterfly needs help – it is in rapid decline. (Photo courtesy of @CreweCitizen) My mother was very oppressed by my father, who had financial control of the family,” he says. “He refused to sign any forms that allowed us to progress in our journeys to university, so Mum used to forge his signature. I hated him for it at the time. I can understand it now, because he’d been cut down in his late forties by his own bad habits and by coronary disease, and I think he was just resentful of any of us children doing better than him.”

It is testament to his recovery from depression that he was able to form a relationship. “Well, I was pretty well better by then,” he says. “Which is the thing that I suppose I need to confess: calling that book Nature Cure was a bit of a con, because I knew it was wonderfully euphonious, but the book is not about me being cured by nature; I was already cured before I started it.” A cross the garden, Polly is putting out lunch, with three brightly coloured blankets for the knees. Did it feel like a different kind of falling in love, with her? Yes, it did,” Mabey says. “I knew I had no escape this time. I can remember very vividly the sort of get-out lines that I had with women before: ‘I just have to let you know I’ve got to look after my mum.’ And I can remember, I had a quite nice fling with [the actress] Liza Goddard for a couple of years, and she said to me, ‘There are two women in your life, Richard, and you’ve got to decide which one.’”

Flora Britannica : Mabey, Richard, 1941- : Free Download

Have you seen our new video Lawnageddon ? It’s the story of one man who dreams of the ‘perfect lawn’, before he wakes up to the importance of Dandelions for nature … have a look He credits Kathleen Jamie with changing his thinking. “She pointed out, in fact, that nature also made you ill, in one or two of those wonderful essays in her first collection Findings, about her husband’s illness. I’m prepared to recognise that nature is entirely indifferent to us. And this hurts a lot of people, the current nature freaks, who think that out there is a” – he sounds mildly repelled – “‘ green warmth’ towards us. This is rubbish.A wide range of insects love the Dandelion for its super-abundant nectar (it’s flowers are edible to humans and are said to taste of honey) and if you grow Dandelions in your garden you will be helping bumble and other sorts of bees, butterflies, moths, other insects and birds. Please join our campaign to celebrate and encourage Dandelions to make our gardens a haven for nature. Tropical thorn forests occupy areas in various parts of the country, though mainly in the northern Gangetic Plain and southern peninsular India. Those forests generally grow in areas with less than 24 inches (600 mm) of rain but are also found in more humid areas, where deciduous forests have been degraded because of unregulated grazing, felling, and shifting agriculture. In those areas, such xerophytic (drought-tolerant) trees as species of acacia (babul and catechu) and Butea monosperma predominate. Mabey once described himself as an epiphyte: an organism that grows and feeds on the surface of another. Upon his release from St Andrew’s, he and his sister cleared the family home. They could not get any local charities to take the furniture, so they burned it in the garden. At that point, instead of going “to a kind of halfway house” he went to stay with childhood friends in Blakeney in Norfolk. As he recovered, they introduced him to a friend called Polly Lavender who’d grown up with a close-knit family on the Norfolk Broads. She had an unusual vivacity and a love of nature that matched his. She also has four children, and grandchildren; Mabey says he never wanted any of his own. India forms an important segment of what is known as the Oriental, or Sino-Indian, biogeographic region, which extends eastward from India to include mainland and much of insular Southeast Asia. Its fauna are numerous and highly diverse. Mammals I’ve been almost afraid to confess that it happens to me,” he tells her. “I thought it would be an insult to being here.”

More About Dandelions - The Fairyland Trust

Some years after his mother’s death, exhausted from completing Flora Britannica, he had a breakdown. He suffered auditory and visual hallucinations, and was hospitalised at St Andrew’s mental health facility in Northampton. In his ability to look very hard, and very closely, at the natural world, Mabey has something in common with Andrew Marvell, whose retreat to a Yorkshire country house after the execution of Charles I produced two years of startling nature poetry. Marvell derives terrific energy from the act of looking, in the knowledge he will never truly be one with his surroundings. There is more at work in his poems than solace, or escape. As a young man Mabey was inspired by JA Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), a dazzling study of the bird written from a place of personal obsession, and by Kenneth Allsop’s columns in the Sunday Times. But the “new nature writing” – that bestselling form with its intense first-person narrations – would probably not exist without him. I am most exhilarated when I can see lives going on which are irrespective of my presence. How can we think clearly about this thing we call nature, in its fullness? Learn to live with all the different ways in which it presents itself? If that springs from a kind of depressive feeling, it actually produces different perspectives on how we categorise the world.”

When life went swimmingly, and work was good, I didn’t want it to be any other way – I was not in any way trapped in the house,” he says. “But when big challenges happened and it came to building a different life of my own I flunked. I became a serious commitment-phobe and had all kinds of catastrophically failed relationships, because I was terrified of starting off on my own.”

Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey | Waterstones

Remaining at home, he says, was “pathological”. “Initially, I was worried that if I ventured out by myself, my mum would lose support. But then it became about me losing support, the house I had grown up in. So it was quite neurotic, my staying there, and that’s eventually what made me ill.” Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuthCovering the native and naturalised plants of England, Scotland and Wales, this book sets out to fulfil the role of a cultural flora, rather than a botanical one. It is an account of the role of wild plants on social life, arts, custom and landscape. Richard Mabey, the renowned author and broadcaster, spent five years researching the work and has collated the results of a nationwide celebration of over 1,000 species. Dandelions are food for at least 46 different types of moth (and that’s just the bigger types) whose ‘caterpillars’ munch on the leaves, stem or roots as youngsters It is unique in that it is not a botanical flora but a cultural one - an account of the role of wild plants in social life, arts, custom and landscape. It is also unique in that information has been supplied by the people themselves. Five years of intensive original research have aroused popular interest and 'grassroots' involvement on an exceptional scale. People all over Britain - both rural and urban - have been encouraged to record and celebrate the cultural dimensions of their own flora, and to send their memories and anecdotes, observations and regional knowledge to Flora Britannica.