Eat and drink like a boozy butterfly this Christmas

NATURE

DIARY OF A YOUNG NATURALIST

by Dara McAnulty (Little Toller £16, 224pp)

The season of autumn is life ‘in a state of slow withering and soft lullaby …’ according to prose poet and nature-lover Dara McAnulty, an autistic Northern Irish teenager who says he often feels utterly overwhelmed by the beauty of the living world around us.

This is an enormously moving book, covering everything from how he was treated by bullies at school to rapturous sightings of hares and red kites on Rathlin Island or in the Mountains of Mourne.

It’s also a warm, funny portrait of his eccentric and loving family, perpetually making you wonder: is it McAnulty’s world view that’s skewed, or everyone else’s? Unique, and my Nature Book of the Year.

ORCHARD: A Year In England’s Eden

by Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates (Collins £20, 256pp)

Orchards truly are England’s little Edens: astonishing havens for wildlife, as well as sources of our world-famous apples and pears.

We have lost far too many in recent decades, neglected or grubbed out as ‘inefficient’.

Yet protecting their unmatched biodiversity is about the most long-sighted and eco-efficient thing we can do. They teem not only with blossoms and fruit, but also bees and woodpeckers, hoverflies and fungi, beetles and mistletoe.

Oh, and jays don’t ‘lose’ the acorns they bury in the autumn (5,000 acorns per jay). They’re planting them so they can harvest the young leaves in the spring as ‘fresh salad for their infants’. Animals were farming long before us. Magical.

SECRETS OF A DEVON WOOD

by Jo Brown (Short Books £14.99, 112pp)

An absolute delight, this lovely little book is filled with the author’s own memorable colour illustrations.

Her focus is on the humblest, most overlooked things she finds in her local Devonshire woods: the fungus Phallus impudicus (or Common Stinkhorn), for instance, and the eerie Wood Ear or Jelly Ear that grows on Elder trees.

There are charming nature notes, too, from the stonechat — ‘their calls sound like stones knocked together’ — to the green tiger beetle, ‘without a doubt the fastest and most erratic beetle I have ever tried to photograph’.

If you remember The Country Diary Of An Edwardian Lady, this is a wonderful kind of 21st-century update.

A LIFE ON OUR PLANET

by David Attenborough (Witness Books £20, 272pp)

From fossil-hunting Leicestershire schoolboy to the best-loved nature presenter in TV history, David Attenborough finally emerges like an old warhorse from his stable to tell us bluntly how it is: the Earth is dying.

When he was 11 years old in 1937, the world’s population was 2.3 billion and the remaining wilderness covered 66 per cent of the planet. Today, the population is 7.8 billion and growing, while wilderness covers just 23 per cent of the world — and that includes icecaps and deserts.

‘The natural world is fading. It will lead to our destruction.’ But the measures we should take, he says encouragingly, are not just losses and restrictions. ‘We gain clean air and water,’ for one thing.

‘We must rewild the world,’ he says — and do it now. A haunting testament, and a sad, wise and urgent book.

HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY

by Matthew Oates (Bloomsbury £20, 416pp)

This is a hugely informative and charmingly oddball portrait of Britain’s most stunning butterfly, the Purple Emperor, and its many admirers.

The author is a self-confessed obsessive in pursuing this most beautiful of our native lepidoptera, and he meets plenty of other genial monomaniacs on his journey (mostly men, for some reason).

They’re are often to be found smearing blue cheese or fish paste on gateposts in summer, in the hope of luring the elusive beauty (left) down from its haunts high in the oakwood canopy. The Emperor is a stunner, but his eating habits are frankly disgusting — and he’s often drunk on fermented oak sap.

LIQUID GOLD

by Roger Morgan-Grenville (Icon £12.99, 272pp)

A chance meeting in a pub leads to the author setting up with another chap, Duncan, as ‘delusional bee-keepers’; starry-eyed amateurs in the honey business, but devoted to their insects.

It grows into a story of friendship and, later, an October tragedy, when they misjudge the amount of honey they should have extracted from the hive (bees can starve to death in just a day or two).

It’s also a convincing portrait of a midlife crisis, as the author admits that ‘the work signpost said, “Go that way”, the values signpost pointed in completely the opposite direction’.

And there’s some nice sly humour: the bees’ amazing substance propolis is like apiarian double-glazing, ‘only without the annoying cold-calling beforehand’.

ENGLISH PASTORAL: An Inheritance

by James Rebanks (Allen Lane £20, 304pp)

James Rebanks stands in a unique position, bang in the middle of what he memorably calls ‘a dialogue of the deaf’: on the one hand, angry farmers, on the other, angry environmentalists.

Rebanks is both a Cumbrian sheep farmer and a brilliant nature writer with a sharp eye and a lyrical heart. His book is devastating, charting the murderous and unsustainable revolution in modern farming: from the old, slow, ‘inefficient’ but infinitely sustainable ways of his grandfather, to the bureaucratised, ‘efficient’ and unsustainable new methods forced on his embittered father.

But the book is also uplifting: Rebanks is determined to hang on to his Herdwicks, to keep producing food, and to bring back the curlews and butterflies and the soil fertility to his beloved fields. Truly a significant book for our time.