Books in the Nature Classics Library series

The Military Orchid is a comic masterpiece - a blend of botany, memoir and satire; the story of Jocelyn Brooke's obsession with one flower - the Orchis Militaris, the military orchid.

Traces the course of a spring which rises on an Iron Age hillfort and gradually broadens into a brook, flows through a nearby village and hamlet, skirts a solitary farmhouse and its orchard, before draining into water meadows and a lake where the wildfowl nest. This book presents the details of this ancient landscape, its people and the habitats.

Through the story of one man, Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd whose flocks graze the Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset borders, this title features men and women of humble birth - poachers, gypsies, farmers and laborers - striving to survive on the land.

Clare Leighton was one of the finest engravers of the twentieth century. This is the story of the garden she carved from meadowland deep in the Chiltern Hills in the 1930s.

Pioneering book of oral history, The Pattern Under the Plough shows that even in modern societies, governed by science and technology, there are still traces of a civilisation whose beliefs were bound to the soil and whose reliance on the seasons was a matter of life or death.

Acutely sensitive to rhythms of the countryside, Edward Thomas's lyrical, passionate, and sometimes political writing merges natural history with folk culture, and gives us a free-form record of the feelings and observations of one of the great poets of the English language. First published 1909 by J.M. Dent & Sons

Adrian Bell's travels through East Anglia and lowland Britain capture the character of the countryside before modern agriculture altered the landscape and changed forever the way we eat and live.

W.G. Hoskins was one of the most original and influential historians of the 20th century. He realized that landscapes are the richest record we have of the past, and with his masterpiece, The Making of the English Landscape, he changed forever how we experience the places we live and work.

Unhappily land-locked in his early adult life, the authors' fortunes changed when he began visiting Scotland's west coast in the 1930s. He made temporary homes with his family on some of the remotest Hebridean islands so he could study the habits of grey seals and seabirds. This book tells about his life on island.

A century before Charles Darwin, decades before the French Revolution, Gilbert White began his lifelong habit of measuring and observing the world around his Hampshire home.

In the 1920s Walter Murray rented a derelict, remote cottage in Sussex, without running water or electricity. Most of the windows were broken, it was dirty and dark. For the next year, he made his home there, making a living from drying and selling herbs. Copsford is his account of that year, a book that bears comparison to Thoreau's Walden

The classic text, now with all the illustrations from the first edition. Ring of Bright Water is an account of the author's life at Camusfearna, a remote cottage in the western Highlands of Scotland. This book also focuses on the two otters, Mijbil and Edal, who became his constant and much-loved companions.

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