Saturday, November 26, 2011

Book Review: A Nature Diary

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: A Nature Diary
Author: Richard Adams
Date: 1985
Publisher: William Clowes Ltd (UK), Viking Penguin (US)
ISBN: 0-670-80105-4
Length: 160 pages
Illustrations: pencil and watercolor sketches by John Lawrence
Quote: "This book...is merely intended to illustrate how much free enjoyment anyone can derive from simply keeping his or her eyes open in going about normal daily affairs."
Richard Adams' introduction to this book begins with a warning of his own. Here is mine. The blurb on the jacket of the Viking hardcover edition says that A Nature Diary "demonstrates, daily and in detail, that for the true nature lover there can be no such thing as boredom." It couldn't be said better. As an Amazon reviewer says, if read in one gulp like a novel this book will become boring. If referred to for purposes of comparing nature notes from year to year or place to place, it will delight you for years...always assuming that you are a person whose daily writing practice includes nature notes.
This diary, probably planned to meet the demand for more books like Edith Holden's posthumously published Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, describes what Adams saw on his daily nature walks. There's more about his dog, who went along on most of the walks, than there is about his human friends (some of whom were about as well known, at the time, as Adams was). Human friends and relatives are mentioned only as companions on nature walks. The only comments on human relationships, social life, or historical events occur when Adams met with conservation and animal protection groups.
If you're interested in learning more about the author of Watership Down and The Plague Dogs, what this book will tell you is primarily how respectful Adams was of other people's privacy. There are only occasional hints about his social background, education, military service, career before he became a famous author, travels, politics, religious faith, and medical condition.
There is a little more about the places he visited during this year; in addition to his home on the Isle of Man, Adams visited London, Glyndebourne, and Bangor on Great Britain, and also went to Australia (in October--at the height of spring, when the paulownias were in bloom).
His observations are precise enough to surprise, delight, and occasionally confuse U.,S. readers. From him we learn that the spiders that get into British houses don't bite. (Most of ours do, although the two venomous species are rare.) We learn that the British "daddy-long-legs" is a winged insect resembling a crane fly; ours is a wingless spiderlike animal with even longer legs. We learn that the British wildflower called fleabane resembles ours, but blooms in late summer rather than early spring. We probably already knew that the British birds called robins and redwings belong to different species than the birds we call by those names, but in this book we get pictures of the British ones.
Edith Holden's Country Diary (which also consists entirely of nature notes, watercolors, and calligraphic copies of poetry about British wildlife) is quite a visual work of art. Holden's paintings could almost be used as a field guide to the flora and fauna she observed. John Lawrence's illustrations for this book are less meticulous. The paulownia is a particular triumph; I suspect that Lawrence hadn't seen this strangely beautiful tree (which has by now become naturalized, and in some areas an invasive nuisance, in the U.S.) but was working from drawings and dried specimens...yet his drawings do look like paulownias...sort of. The landscapes are sketchier. The picture of the sun shining into the glade with the waterfall (on the dust jacket, if you find a copy that still has its dust jacket) is representative.
Adams wrote more words of his own and, mindful of stricter copyright laws, copied fewer poems into this book, which is calligraphy-free. He does quote Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hartley Coleridge (the less successful son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and some bits of Manx folklore and language, but A Nature Diary is more of a real diary and less of a "commonplace book."
As Adams warns us, anybody with an interest in the subject and a few field guides could write a book similar to this one. The Internet now enables us to publish such "books" as blogs or as digital photo series. People who enjoy A Nature Diary would even like it if more of us shared our "nature diaries." However, A Nature Diary has the tremendous advantage of having been printed on actual paper, so you don't have to look at a computer screen or wait for complex images to download. Delightful.
A Nature Diary is recommended to anyone who enjoys phenology, ecology, animals, and landscapes. Click here to buy it from me.

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