Nige recalls the day (26 June 2011 to be precise) that he fulfilled a lifelong lepidopterist's dream and first spotted that most elusive of butterflies, a Purple Emperor... I'd had dubious glimpses of this largest and most elusive of our butterflies in the past: high in the treetops, briefly outlined against ... Read More...
Nature
Continuing his tree house theme, Jonathan Law peeks into the arboreal dens of two great poets... To an averagely imaginative child, a tree house surely offers a unique combination of delights. Like other outdoor dens, it is a liminal space where the wild consorts oddly with the domestic and the homely ... Read More...
At The Dabbler we are blessed with the finest commenters on the internet. Jonathan Law’s comments are so deep, rich and insightful (and frankly he’s costing us a fortune in Glengoyne whisky) that we have invited him to write his own feature. Notes in the Margin will be an irregular column ... Read More...
Not everything is getting worse, Nige admits. Our rivers have been transformed in recent years... Even I, a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, have to admit that in at least two respects life in England has unequivocally improved in the course of my lifetime. One is the range and quality of food available in ... Read More...
One from the Dabbler archives this Bank Holiday Monday - Ian Vince's account of one of the oddest twitchers you'd ever be likely to meet.... It had been a long walk through the Shropshire hills in search of fossils and, with a good morning’s work completed and a bag full of ... Read More...
Nature writing is something we enjoy and sometimes do here at The Dabbler. The next Dabbler Book Club selection is right up our woodland path: Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie. Here's what Philip Hoare, himself no mean writer about nature, thought of Sightlines: Kathleen Jamie, the Scottish poet, has written a book that ... Read More...
Nige debunks the English myth of the wild wood... I am, as readers of my blog will have noticed, a lover of woodland - but I really couldn't see what last year's fuss about the proposed sale of Forestry Commission land was all about [Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, called it "an unforgivable act of ... Read More...
On Monday I heard an item on Radio 4's Today programme about bees and colony collapse disorder – I can’t quite recall, but I think it may have been something to do with the ‘zombie’ parasite fly honeybee killer reported in Scientific American? On Tuesday I visited the Royal College of ... Read More...
Nige explores a county where "history is written on the face of the land"... Tell someone you're going walking in Leicestershire and chances are you'll be greeted by a blank bewildered look, or the bald question 'Why?' In fact, Leicestershire has some of the best walking country in England - wide open ... Read More...
We're blessed with more than a comment from Malty today. Here he considers the cultural ramifications of trees. One of the pleasures of returning home, after time spent away from the ranch, used to be sitting on the favourite window seat and reading through the accumulated pile of letters. Letters : ... Read More...
