Books by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

'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.