Small Wonder - a new approach to understanding nature

Every so often a book comes along which seems not so much to have been written specially but to have evolved naturally. Edith Holden's Country Diary was one such, so was Tony Soper's Bird Table Book, and now here's another. Mari Friend was discouraged in her early attempts to become a naturalist on the grounds that it was something 'only vicar's daughters' did. Having succeeded, though, and having become an experienced natural history teacher and wildlife gardener, she has produced very much the sort of book an Edwardian vicar's daughter might have, just at the time when her kind of approach to her subject is coming back into fashion. For the strength of the 'vicar's daughter' attitude to natural history is that it studies the whole natural community rather than isolated bits of it and starts not with the exotic and amazing but with the familiar and homely - which is where the re-greening of our planet, if it is to happen, has to start. The author begins by describing econetworks which lead naturally to a discussion of the interaction between plants and insects and pave the way for a detailed consideration of wildlife gardening and animal homebuilding. Further chapters deal with the ecology of freshwater, fields, hedges, woods and seashore - and a short passage entitled 'Winter survival' shows brilliantly how hibernation, seed formation and leaf loss are all ways of combatting cold. This is in every way a personal book. It is informed by the author's considerable experience at Bracken Hall Countryside Centre, to which she often refers in anecdotal detail, and it is illustrated by her own profuse and precise paintings and drawings. Pictures are, throughout, text-led and the book's overall design serves rather than determines its content, all of which factors help to make a very real book, crammed with observable examples. The text reads smoothly from one end to the other, developing ideas as it goes - a far and refreshing cry from the capsular presentations beloved of so many information publishers. As the author addresses the reader on equal terms, this is a book for the mature (but flexible) mind; it will be at its best in the staffroom of any lively school or on the bookshelf of any lively family. Public Libraries, VIth forms and, especially, vicar's daughters would be silly to miss it.