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. Most meadow-makers buy wildflower seeds for the initial creation. However, Baczkowska explains, commercially produced seed is grown to be harvested on the same day, so new knapweed flowers, for instance, will flower together and go to seed in the same week. Hand-collecting local seed – as Norfolk Wildlife Trust does in partnership with Norfolk Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, a charity run by farmers – gives meadows a much longer flowering season, making them more useful to pollinators, and more beautiful. “Keeping local seed types going will give you this resilience to climate change. It’s not just the diversity of species; diversity of genetics is really important,” says Baczkowska. 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.

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."

A favorite passage appears early: He built miles of fences, yards of homemade wooden pipe, a house, barns, sheds, corrals. He put up hay with horses and got down to scythe among the willows where the mower couldn't go. He never quit from the last star to first, proving that the price of independence is slavery. (p. 11). This jumping around ended up making the book somewhat boring for me a times. Also, I think I have had my fill of books like this even when they have a better layout for the histories and stories of the people. But can it really be wise to lose productive food-producing fields to flowers? “We have to look at the bigger picture,” argues Forbes Adam. “It brings huge numbers of pollinators to the landscape, which benefit all the neighbouring farmers.”

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.” The individuality of different meadows is their strength. On Landseer park, in the heart of urban Ipswich, wildflower-rich chalk banks created by the charity Buglife and an inspiring young conservationist, David Dowding, an Ipswich borough council ranger, are now home to scarce butterflies such as the dark green fritillary. Off the busy A19 between York and Selby is Three Hagges, a “woodmeadow” created in 2012 by Ros Forbes Adam, whose family has farmed the area for 350 years. Further, Taber often used the word, that, when it was unnecessary and the layman’s word, whole, to describe the whole earth, the whole field, etc. while other more polished words might be considered as a replacement such as the word, entire. She also used the word, foam, several times to describe certain aspects which weren’t particularly foamy. The loathsome word, like, was additionally a bit overused. In general her wording is a little too simple at moments for my taste. 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).

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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.” Beautifully illustrated with photographs specially taken by Jim Holden, Meadow is not only an insightful guide that helps to reveal the secret life of the flora and fauna of our classic hay meadows, but it also acts as a long-overdue celebration of the people behind these enigmatic grasslands. 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. The simple farm woman guise that Gladys wears so naturally is actually quite deceptive. Underneath, she is a very literary woman whose skillful pen continues to sow love into the heart of her readers forty years after her death. 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.

Finally, Taber’s world is a remarkably honorable life however this doesn’t mean I wish to read every last minutiae of her and Jill waxing their furniture each Spring. It was deeply moving to learn how much Taber exponentially appreciates the beauty of nature and all living creatures aside from cows strangely enough. I too live a simple, often mundane life as she did therefore I don’t care to read humdrum details about it. While there are moments the book was quite charming in warmth of heart, all in all it wasn’t the type of bookcraft to swoon me. It would be desirable if all the more wondrous descriptions in her publications could be extracted into a single volume so one wouldn’t have to muddle through as it were. 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.”

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.

James Galvin works magic with The Meadow, and he successfully weaves together multiple strands of family history. This book is technically a novel, but it pulses with a frictionless reality. Product restrictions: We are unable to ship seeds, plants, bulbs, inflammable products, food and beverages outside of the United Kingdom Xmas Delivery Dates 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. I have a hypothesis that the book is narrated entirely by an abstracted version of James Galvin. Maybe this is obvious to others and I’m late to the party, but I found myself struggling to figure out who was talking to me and how/why they were involved.Any lawn or verge can be rewilded. Some remove turf and top-soil before sowing. Or just scuff up existing sward with a spade and a rake to make space for new seed. I use Emorsgate Seeds for native wildflowers, but if you can find a local seed source, that is even better. Every Flower Counts. Take part in this plant survey and Plantlife will give you your own personal nectar score, so you can see how many bees your wilder lawn is feeding. The surviving hay meadows of the British Isles are an intrinsic part of our cultural heritage, representing a natural equivalent to our great churches, castles, and ancient standing stones. Those that remain provide a tantalising glimpse into the past to a time long before chemical fertilisers and herbicides robbed our grasslands of all their treasures; they are biodiversity hotspots, offering home and sanctuary to flora and fauna. Consider the relationships between environment and man, man and animal, man and man, animal and environment. Consider tools and how men employ them as an intermediary in their relationship with the environment. Consider the passage of time. Consider how time washes over man, how brief our time here is. Consider the immutability of the environment, but how man's relationship with the environment mutates over time. Consider the struggle of life.