Nature Cure, Richard Mabey

Richard Mabey’s memoir Nature Cure delves into his long standing connection with the natural world — a connection which he lost when suffering from severe depression. Leaving the woods of the Chiltern hills for the open flatlands of Norfork, Mabey discovers not only a whole new landscape, but new ways of looking at the natural world and our place in it.

Today we noticed that on its very last page, a previous owner of this book inscribed the following quote by George Monbiot:

“Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.”

Richard Mabey is an award-winning nature writer, author of books such as The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination (2015), and Whistling in the Dark: In Pursuit of the Nightingale (1993), winner of the East Anglia Book Award, 2010, in a revised version entitled The Barley Bird, Beechcombings: the narratives of Trees (2007), the ground-breaking and best-selling “cultural flora” Flora Britannica (1996), winner of a National Book Award, and Gilbert White, which won the Whitbread Biography Award in 1986. Nature Cure was short-listed for three major literary awards, the Whitbread, Ondaatje, and J.R. Ackerley prizes.