The Accidental Garden (eBook)

These are wide-ranging debates that cover the gender-fluid nature of plants, decolonisation, migration, native/nonnative, reparations for nature through the lens of the wood, the lawn, the pond and the flowerbed. I felt like I'd spent a great afternoon, lying in the dappled shade of a garden tree, listening to Mabey muse on a life with plants.

Encourages us to think less of conquering the landscape and more of sharing it with the myriad creatures and organisms that treat our lawns and beds as home

Both instructive and exciting, often ecstatic... Mabey is a great, pioneering nature writer

Absolutely enchanting ... With wisdom, wit, erudition and modesty, Mabey explores the edgeland between cultivation and wildness

Part memoir, part naturescape... there is also something much rarer in this book: wisdom. What a treat

A crusade in defence of a natural world under threat ... Mabey's powers of nature observation, and his gift for translating them into words has made [his work] both celebrated and timeless

At once intimate, investigative, scientific and beautiful... Irresistible

Mabey is a national treasure

Our greatest nature writer

A wonderful memoir... Every page is dotted with pearls of wisdom gleaned from his decades as a nature writer

Eloquently and succinctly written by an enlightened ecologist ... a celebration of the garden, its meaning to us as humans, our memories, our long lives, what we can leave for future generations

An enchanting, meditative account of a garden and its lives

Part memoir, part journal, part treatise ... this slim book captures it all. A thoughtful, lingering read

Engaging and erudite... a great read

Mabey is the kind of person you wish you had with you on every country walk

This is obviously a meditation on place, but also--crucially--on time. On how we respond, practically but also morally and emotionally, to the accelerating change around us. A classic for this moment

This is Classic Mabey: witty and wise, mixing profound concern with the environment with delight at the way in which nature never fails to surprise us

Delightful ... Richard Mabey is the doyen of UK nature writing

We are lucky to have [Richard Mabey]. He has changed the way we are with plants and made a loved world lovelier still

A superb stylist with profound tenderness and compassion towards the more-than-human world

Inspirational ... meditative ... an advocate for a new non-domineering understanding of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world

As in all his work, what comes across is [Mabey's] abiding passion for plants and the sustenance they give both imaginatively and spiritually

Masterly ... This new work by the ever-marvellous Mabey exhorts us to pay our dues to the other inhabitants of our gardens accordingly

A discursive, philosophical memoir about everything from the human desire to shape nature to what Mabey calls the ambiguous experience of gardening in the midst of an environmental emergency