Bøger af Richard Mabey

The classic foraging guide to over 200 types of food that can be gathered and picked in the wild, Food for Free returns in its 40th year as a sumptuous, beautifully illustrated and fully updated anniversary edition.Originally published in 1972, Richard Mabey's classic foraging guide has never been out of print since. Food for Free is a complete guide to help you safely identify edible species that grow around us, together with detailed artwork, field identification notes and recipes.In this stunning 40th anniversary edition, Richard Mabey's fully-revised text is accompanied by photographs, new recipes and a wealth of practical information on identifying, collecting, cooking and preparing, history and folklore. Informatively written, beautifully illustrated and produced in a new, larger format, Food for Free will inspire us to be more self-sufficient and make use of the natural resources around us to enhance our lives.

Ever since the first human settlements 10,000 years ago, weeds have dogged our footsteps. They are there as the punishment of 'thorns and thistles' in "Genesis" and, two millennia later, as a symbol of "Flanders Field". The author examines how we have tried to define them, explain their persistence, and draw moral lessons from them.

We regard gardens as our personal dominions, where we can create whatever worlds we desire. But they are also occupied by myriads of other organisms, all with their own lives to lead. The conflict between these two power bases, Richard Mabey suggests, is a microcosm of what is happening in the larger world. In this provocative book, rooted in the daily dramas of his own Norfolk garden, Mabey offers a different scenario, where nature becomes an equal partner, a 'gardener' itself. Against a background of disordered seasons he watches his 'accidental' garden reorganising itself. Ants sow cowslip seeds in the parched grass. Moorhens take to nesting in trees. A spectacular self-seeded rose springs up in the gravel. The garden becomes a place of cultural and ecological fusion, and perhaps a metaphor for the troubled planet. This is vintage Mabey, maverick, intensely observed, and written with an unquenchable sense of wonder.

Richard Mabey reveals the astonishingly rich world of animal and plant life surviving and often thriving among docklands, railways, factories and canals.

In Beechcomings Richard Mabey set out to uncover our relationship with trees, and specifically the beech, their significance in nature and meaning in folklore.

A new special edition of the seminal, bestselling book, with a new foreword by the author and a new jacket by the artist Michael Kirkman, to celebrate the author's 80th birthday.

An exploration of our preoccupation with the weather, as heard on BBC Radio 3: Changing Climates. In his trademark style, the author weaves together science, art and memoirs to show the weather's impact on our culture and national psyche. He rambles through the myths of Golden Summers and our persistent state of denial about the winter.

The British love their birds, which are inextricably entwined with every aspect of their island life. British customs, more than 1,000 years of English literature, the very fabric of society, even the landscape itself, have all been enhanced by the presence of birds.

While the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, Flora Thompson's much-loved portrait of life in the English countryside, has inspired a hit television series, relatively little is known about the author herself. In this highly original book, bestselling biographer and nature writer Richard Mabey sympathetically retraces her life and her transformation from a post-office clerk who left school at fourteen to a sophisticated professional writer. Revealing how a formidable imagination can arise from the humblest of beginnings, Dreams of the Good Life paints a poignant, unforgettable portrait of a working-class woman writer's struggle for creative expression.

In this remarkable journal of visits to Eden, Mabey transports his reader from Cornwall to the Mediterranean to the Tropics, from Old World to New, from present to personal memory, to new perspectives on our collective artistic and emotional past.

In Ted Hughes's phrase, the reappearance of the swifts tells us that "the globe's still working." When we encounter the author in the opening pages of this powerful memoir, his corner of the globe is decidedly not working. A deep depression has left him alienated from his work and his family, financially insecure, and has cost him the Chiltern home in which he has lived his entire life.

The Cabaret of Plants is a masterful, globe-trotting exploration of the relationship between humans and the kingdom of plants by the renowned naturalist Richard Mabey.A rich, sweeping, and wonderfully readable work of botanical history, The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty, and belief. Going back to the beginnings of human history, Mabey shows how flowers, trees, and plants have been central to human experience not just as sources of food and medicine but as objects of worship, actors in creation myths, and symbols of war and peace, life and death.Writing in a celebrated style that the Economist calls "delightful and casually learned," Mabey takes readers from the Himalayas to Madagascar to the Amazon to our own backyards. He ranges through the work of writers, artists, and scientists such as da Vinci, Keats, Darwin, and van Gogh and across nearly 40,000 years of human history: Ice Age images of plant life in ancient cave art and the earliest representations of the Garden of Eden; Newton's apple and gravity, Priestley's sprig of mint and photosynthesis, and Wordsworth's daffodils; the history of cultivated plants such as maize, ginseng, and cotton; and the ways the sturdy oak became the symbol of British nationhood and the giant sequoia came to epitomize the spirit of America.Complemented by dozens of full-color illustrations, The Cabaret of Plants is the magnum opus of a great naturalist and an extraordinary exploration of the deeply interwined history of humans and the natural world.

Home Country is a classic memoir by Britain's most popular nature writer.

When the pioneering naturalist Gilbert White (1720-93) wrote "The Natural History of Selborne" (1789), he created one of the greatest and influential natural history works, his detailed observations about birds and animals providing the cornerstones of modern ecology. This biography tells the story of this clergyman.

Described as 'Britain's greatest living nature writer', the author has revealed his passion for the natural world in eloquent stories for BBC Wildlife Magazine. This title features his favourite pieces and presents a view of the changing natural landscape in which we live.

From ash die-back to the Great Storm of 1987, our much-loved woodlands seem to be under constant threat from a procession of natural challenges. The author reveals how we have appropriated and humanised trees, turning them into arboreal pets. She argues that respecting trees' independence may be the wisest response to their current crises.

'Britain's greatest living nature writer' The TimesRediscover the extraodinary power of nature and the British wilderness, from award-winning naturalist and author Richard MabeyIn the last year of the old millennium, Richard Mabey, Britain's foremost nature writer, fell into a severe depression.

the outer limit is making leather out of apples);* 'Cooking against the grain' - if we didn't have access to wheat, what could we make with nuts?* How to deal with gluts - those autumn mountains of beans and courgettes;* Making-do the wartime way - canny tricks his mother taught him;

Whether creating a cassoulet which uses English ingredients, making bread from chestnuts or slow-cooking a Peking duck in front of an ancient fan heater, this book encourages us to be daring and imaginative in our cooking and our approach to food.

Indeed, Flora Britannica is the definitive contemporary flora, an encyclopaedia of living folklore, a register - a sort of Domesday Book. 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.