Bestselling nature writer Richard Mabey talks to us about his latest book 'The Accidental Garden' and what to expect at his upcoming appearance at Southwold Literary Festival where he'll be in conversation with Ian Collins.
Richard Mabey is one of our greatest nature writers. He is the author of some 30 books including the bestselling plant bible Flora Britannica and Nature Cure which was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Ondaatje and Ackerley Awards. A regular commentator on radio and in the press, he was elected a Fellow in the Royal Society of Literature in 2012. He lives in Norfolk. His latest book The Accidental Garden: Gardens, Wilderness & the Space In Between has been described as "part memoir, part naturescape and part gardening book... there is also something much rarer in this book: wisdom. What a treat” by The Times and “Delightful... The Accidental Garden provides an overview of Mabey's evolved thinking over a lifetime... Richard Mabey is the doyen of UK nature writing” by New Statesman.
Richard is one of the speakers at the Southwold Literary Festival appearing on Saturday 9 November. You can find The Accidental Garden and Richard's other books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
I wasn’t one of those precocious kids that read Jane Eyre aged four. I was into Biggles and the adventures of Wilson in the Wizard. Then the summer holiday escape novels of David Severn. My first ‘nature‘ book was Richard Jefferies’ Wild Life in a Southern County which I read when I was about eleven. But it was Dylan Thomas’ poetry that set me writing. Just the stuff for a romantic teenager. I hitched a lift with a fellow would-be poet to his native village in Wales
I don’t have a process. I’ve never taken notes, I just watch and listen and think a lot. It’s the thinking that fixes the memory I suspect, so that my recall, which is pretty good, is already imaginatively processed!
I’m very keen on “watching narrowly“ as Gilbert White put it. But I don’t believe that this is scientific commodification. Knowing the identity and life-ways of other beings is a mark of respect. Who are you? Where do you live? How are things? These are the courteous questions we’d ask of members of our own species. So regard and enquire of our fellow organisms as if they were neighbours.
The four years spent on Flora B were some of the most rewarding of my working life. We reckoned we received the memories and experiences of ten thousand contributors. The field work took me all over the UK: filming for Country File about surviving Christmas superstitions as I walked among the dwarf holly pollards on the Stiperstones, searching for red cowslips in Suffolk churchyards…. I also vividly remember the writing process itself, some of it sitting under the beech tree in my garden in the Chilterns, typing on a smart Toshiba desk portable, surrounded by piles of reference books and the postcard and full length essays of our contributors.
Accidental Garden is a mixture of memoir, philosophical meditation and documentary. It’s an argument questioning the idea that gardening is about “connecting with nature”. It’s really just about control. Even when it’s so called “wildlife gardening “ we are dictating what goes where. Accidental Garden is an account of what happens when, in a large part of your plot, you let nature take control , or at least engage in what I call “parallel development”. Watch how seed-ferrying insects and parasitic plants create grassland, how self seeded trees begin new woodland, all based on events in our own garden.
At my age I should be forcibly put out to grass! But when you’ve written professionally for sixty years it’s an ineradicable part of who you are. I’ve written a lot about art over the years and I have the beginnings of an idea for a book about how our species has made images of the natural world, from cave painting to land art, and how these images have affected the way we see and think about nature. Provisional title Double Vision. In the meantime I’ve finished preparing a new edition of my 1993 book about nightingales, Whistling in the Dark, to be published next spring.
I’m in conversation with Ian Collins, whose latest book is an extraordinary biography of our mutual old friend - and Suffolk’s literary godfather- the late Ronald Blythe. So I expect we’ll be talking a lot about Ronnie, and about how the East Anglian landscape provokes, shapes, inflames and soothes ones writing.
We are beginning to understand much more about the intelligence and resilience of wild organisms, and I think there will be much more attention - and respect- paid to their autonomy and agendas, and even rights. We are all still stuck with being human supremacists, but it’s time to recognise that wild beings are equal citizens of the earth, and that we don't always know what’s best for them.
I don’t find the current fashion in nature writing very appealing. The emphasis is egocentric, on the self, using the natural world as a mirror for its problems. But I love what I would call romantic ecology, and go back repeatedly to the essays of Lewis Thomas and Annie Dillard.
At school I sang in a madrigal choir and played lute accompaniments on my guitar. I’ve been an early music nut ever since. Jordi Savall is one of my few heroes.
