Non Fiction Authors From England

"Margery Fish, who published eight gardening books in the 1950s and 1960s, was, with Sackville-West and , one of the leading English s of her day. She began late, in her 40s, and We Made A Garden tells us how it happened."

"The gardener Margery Fish married , the tyrannical editor of , and they moved out of London to where a regimented, formal garden was created. After he died she uprooted the lot and started again, to create a romanitc oasis, now designated by as a ."

"The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from."

"All the from my open fires is shared among the plants that particularly like , s and es particularly, and I give some to the , and in the winter the apple trees get their share. When I grew potatoes and es they, too, were lucky."

"holidays— and 1st of November—were our aim for the ceremonies of ."

"If ever a garden was born of creative tension, it is the one at in . When Margery Fish moved there with her husband, in 1937, she wished to fill beds with simple cottage garden plants; he desired neat lawns, straight paths and bright summer bedding. Margery went on to record their battle for control in her 1956 book, We Made A Garden; with its passive aggressive tone, it is as much about their marriage as the garden, yet it is still a horticultural classic to be read and re-read., In the end, Margery won: Walter died in 1947, and with him the need to compromise. In 1951, she wrote her first piece on gardening for , and went on to publish numerous magazine articles and eight books."

"It is not possible to make sweeping statements about what will or will not grow in clay soil, because there are so many different types of clay. Some are much stickier and more difficult to handle than others; clay that has been made easier to handle by the addition of will grow most plants. I don't believe there is any soil that will not grow something."

"If the flower spikes are kept cut the makes good cover because the roots are strong and the beetroot-colored leaves quite big. The plants should be put fairly close together and soon colonise if all the spikes are not removed very quickly."

"believed in manuring with a very generous hand and woe betide any little plant of mine that grew nearby, as it would surely die of suffocation under the great gallops of manure that were plastered round every rose. All the manure we could get was devoted to the roses and s."

"s are particularly valuable for the winter and one in particular, , is a good all-the-year plant for a place in the garden that is in constant use. I noticed a very happy and very natural treatment of a bed next to the porch of a front door."

"Even the canny invader William the Conqueror can be thought to have contributed to the total of our plant list. When he came to build what we now know as the s, he preferred use material with which he was already acquainted rather than stone from unknown English quarries, so the walls of castles like and were built from stone imported from the . Incidental to its main purpose, the stone itself carried the seeds of a double invasion — seeds of two plants we think of as being most quintessentially English. The first was the , and the second was . Both were seen blooming on the stone walls of in France, so the pretty little delicate pink which is used in the breeding of nearly all of our border pinks is the result of ."

"The key consideration when is the , because you need to choose species that can cope with having their roots so restricted. The soil in a small container also tends to dry out and lose its quicker than that in a large one. So unless you have a lot of time and love to give to your containers, it's worth choosing fairly low-maintenance plants that can cope with dry, nutrient-poor, small spaces, or plants that are extremely slow grown. Plants such as s, s and other , ' and other and even many herbs such as , and can cope with slightly drier, nutrient-poor conditions and, dare I say, neglect from us growers!"

", is a lovely plant that provides so very much in the garden or in a row, offering a safe haven and bountiful feast for nesting birds and s. It's also an incredibly useful plant for us. The edible spring leaves are great in salads, and the autumn berries, or haws, can be used in lots of dishes and drinks."

"Trees can be record breakers: they can be one of the oldest living s in the world: Californian specimens of ', the Wellingonia or Big Tree, are believed to be at least 4,000 years old. They can also be the largest form of life: a which grows in in Mexico — and which, incidentally, is about 2,000 years old — has a circumference measuring 54 s (178) and is 40 metres (130ft) high. Its weight is estimated to be about 500 s."

"... I had a very traditional start – as an apprentice at 19, my job was to pick up dog poo and make the head gardener tea. Then at the I learned about conservation, and . Slowly, cogs move and you end up miles away from where you began, without really noticing that it’s happened. ... After school I worked at and did a foundation degree in art. Then a gardening apprenticeship came up and I made a snap decision. I walked around the garden with the head gardener and just thought, oh, this is amazing, I want to work here. I realised I like being in soil and muddy and the creativity that doesn’t involve sitting at a desk."

"Evelyn ... wrote the first (and only) bestseller on : was published in 1664 and addressed and the shortage of . ... "We had better be without gold than without timber," Evelyn wrote, because without trees there would be no iron and glass industry, no fires to warm houses in winter, nor a navy to protect the shores of England. Timber was, as Maggie Campbell-Culver points out, the oil of the 17th century, and the shortage of it created similar anxieties about fuel, manufacturing and transport as threats to oil production do today. Sylva was a response to these fears, encouraging the reader to plant trees as an act of patriotic duty. ... A Passion for Trees is beautifully illustrated with paintings and sumptuous botanical drawings. But the use of explanatory extensive "text boxes" (some are four pages long) interrupts the narrative. As with her first book The Origin of Plants, Campbell-Culver is at her strongest and most convincing when she delves into the lives of the trees, although both Evelyn himself and the age in which he lived remain elusive throughout the book."

"There are some roses that always flower late, not just in a freak year. I always enjoy November roses, whether it is 'Madame Abel Chatenay', that wreathes the dining-room window, or , who pops up from behind the barton wall at a time when I thought all good roses had gone to sleep."

"Frances is one of the main team of ' presenters, alongside . She has written several books and is a familiar face at garden and literary festivals. The publication of her first children’s book, How to Grow a Garden, and her forthcoming appearance as a guest speaker at Toby’s Garden Festival in May is why I’m calling her today. How to Grow a Garden is a colourful, hardback book which takes young readers on a journey through different gardens, from veg plots to rows and meadows, s, and various exotic gardens. Each garden is beautifully illustrated by Charlotte Ager and is packed with vibrant and fun plants, animals and insects. Throughout, Frances has added little descriptions and facts and each garden has a seasonal to-do list of inspiring and creative ideas for children (which adults will certainly enjoy doing as well)."

"In 1992, almost 2,000 of the world's leading scientists presented us with another way of looking at the world. In , they informed us that the current trajectory of was unsustainable. ... ... Some of us see what is happening but have little ability to act. Others see something else entirely because maintaining the juggernaut of the and is the priority. For them, the does little but get in the way."

"Thousands of , , , , , and are being planted, to create habitats of indigenous – of tree cover and open grazing. A flickered along the prickly spine of the new fence built to separate the sheep from the trees. Further on, beyond a bank of glacial , the infant disappeared behind a drystone wall above what was once a but has become a dry ochre basin of ' grasses. Canalised in a previous century, the Mint is to be re-meandered to its original course through the valley bottom, and Dub Ings will become a tarn once more. Like the new trees, this work – done in partnership with and another local farm – is intended to lessen the effects of flooding on communities further downstream; the memory of is never far away."

"The remains unambiguous, but still the fox hunts continue. Since the ban came into force more than ten years ago, I've seen — or more often heard — a number of hunts in progress. I've heard hounds in tracking rapidly across the open ground of the higher s, their baying echoing around the valley. Or down by the , men with s, turning to see who was driving past. Up here in , the hunt has always been on foot, but for all the lack of pomp and , and money, I still loathe it."

"In my despair—for it had arrived at that, so futile seemed my killings—I worried experts for some slugicide that would not kill my plants, but only their destroyers; and finally one day in I poured my woes out in the sympathetic ear of . The Director of the has need to be most patient if many others question him as I have done. HIs answer in this case was prompt, direct, and simple—"A and a ." So then the war on s really began."

"As well as the human remains, the jawbone of a was unearthed at . Lynx became extinct in the UK about 1,800 years ago, but I found it exciting to think of these beautiful, lithe creatures roaming over my home landscape. There were the bones of a 7,000-year-old that had most likely been dragged up to the cave by an animal. And a short distance away, in fact just an arrow's flight from Kirkhead Tower, is , the place where the last wolf in England was reputedly killed. And although this idea might be fanciful (how on earth would anyone know where the very last wolf died anyway?), there's evidence of wolves right here on the doorstep. had been roaming northern Britain over 1,300 years ago and their bones were found in the cavern. They had been gnawed by a large predator. The most likely candidate? Wolf."

"... in Spring we can hold our own with the best. in variety nestle in the s; s dance in radiant glory by the thousand along the banks of streams, and stray into field and woodland; s life their delicate faces at the heel of every hedge, and carpet all the shaws; s are not lacking in the meadows, and the early purple, spotted, green-winged, meadow, and marsh s, spread their lavenders and purples among the lush grass, where the evasive peachy-mauve of adds its shimmer of delicate colour."

"... was born. Merchant, traveller, philanthropist and author, his business took him to Spain and , and his journeyings furnished matter for sundry tomes when he retired with a fortune. But it is a public benefactor, particularly to the seafaring-folk, that his name is chiefly remembered, and and are his best memorials. Yet, when the very titles of his seventy publications are lost altogether, and his efforts to promote s and redress the trying lot of the ers are alike forgotten, one fact may keep his memory green—he was the first man to walk the streets of London under an umbrella! Another local philanthropist was , the originator of s, and the queer little house where the cobbler lived is still in Highbury Street. Not far off was the . It was afterwards removed to the now about on High Street."

"Water reveals how small our lives are in time as well as space. Less than 0.025% of the water on our planet exists in all the world’s rivers, lakes, marshes and biological s combined. A river is water’s chance to flicker and dance under the sun before it returns to the deep, dark ocean, is frozen in or stored away underground, sometimes for hundreds of millennia. Flowing water moves mountains, it hollows and builds land. It provides the medium in which the chemistry of life recycles and reorganises energy and matter."

"19TH JULY SACRED GROVES Ancient Rome The Roman term ' (plural luci) referes to a class of woodland with special religious significance. Luci took the form of sacred groves or clearings, often featuring special trees and springs. They were places of celebration, communion and ritual offering. Well-documented examples include in (now in ) and (now the city of ). The was celebrated within such groves on 19th and 20th July."

"We speak of as if rock were the epitome of durability. It isn’t. Where rock meets water, it is water that wins in time, every time, and there are few places in England where this is more obviously true than the . Hollowness is ubiquitous here; a landscape riddled with caves and pots and channels. You can even watch them forming in many rivers and becks, where below most drops, you can find circular dishings in the rock, some shallow, some deep, some containing pebbles conscripted to the river’s work; swirling and scouring, day and night. ... It’s not necessarily the speed, volume or power of a river that wins, but its relentlessness. It needs no breath, no sleep, no pause to stretch or shake. And in time, without fuss or ceremony, it will take heat from flesh, life from limb, tree from bank, rock from channel, mountain from continent. It will hollow the land. And it demands total respect."

"... "wild service" ... is an ethos ... giving back to nature — but also, obviously, it's the name of . ... it's, after all, the tree of generosity and hospitality that used to be grown on the grounds of s, because beer was . So when you see a pub called "The Chequers", it's named for this wonderful ..."

"As the sun dips towards the horizon, a huge white ice arch becomes suffused with a pink glow. In front of this amazing backdrop hundreds of s huddle together as the temperature plummets to -30ºC. It had taken me almost 2 weeks to reach this part of in an and several hours trudging over the ice to reach this spot, but I knew this moment would live with me forever. As I savoured the pristine wilderness, I reflected that had I chosen another path as a career I would never have experienced this magical moment. By the time I married Martin (a fellow zoologist) at the age of 23, I presumed I would carve out a career as a for life. After all, I had a zoology degree and had been doing marine biological research for 3 years. I never dreamt I would abandon my love for the marine world and develop an even greater passion for photography. Yet, it was only a few years later that I took the plunge to work as a freelance ."

"flowers show various adaptations to attract s—in the form of colour, pattern or scent or a combination of these factors. Flowers which are pollinated by butterflies and moths are usually heavily scented, especially those which are visited at night."

"In addition to photographing flowers extensively on both sides the Atlantic, I have been fortunate to work in locations as diverse as South Africa, China, the Galápagos Islands, the high Arctic, the , and the Himalayas, and to participate in an unforgettable pony trek to Kashmir. Photographing garden flowers may not involve such intrepid expeditions, but it can be equally challenging and rewarding nonetheless. In fact, the current vogue of s has blurred the traditional distinctions between garden flowers and ."

"From the discovery of , we know that the once existed over a much larger range extending into Burma and northern Vietnam in the south, in China almost as far north as Beijing, the capital, and near Hong Kong and Shanghai in the east. Changes in climate reduced some of the panda's range, but in the twentieth century, the prime factor has been the rapid encroachment of the human population on the . As native forests have been logged or clear-cut for agriculture, suitable panda habitat has continued to shrink, until today it is confined to six mountain ranges running southwest from south of to south of along the eastern edge of the ."

"Colour is of prime importance to life on earth: plants use it to attract s and to aid dispersal of their fruit; animals use it to attract mates, as s and as ."

"My training was basically as an ecologist—for is largely applied ecology—and, since serving in Ghana for 14 years in the 1930s and 1940s. I have been back 14 times to East, South and West Africa. Even when I started work, it was already clear that the arid land such as the could not be safely occupied other than by s, who with their flocks and herds of grazers and browsers can use small patches of mixed vegetation scattered over a wide area, seldom causing anything more than limited short-term degradation, for the nomads had worked out a '."

"... by the third millennium the ns had developed a type which is shown in art of that period. Egyptian monuments of at least one thousand years earlier show dogs very like the modern and others like the ."

"Some animals lend themselves to use in idioms—the goose is a good example of this. As long ago as 1547 a simpleton was being referred to as a goose; presumably a domestic goose, for a wild goose is anything but a fool."

"When Attenborough joined the , in 1952, what were then called “animal programs” were presented by the superintendent of the London Zoo, a Mr. George Cansdale. Once a week, Mr. Cansdale would bring a selection of more or less compliant creatures to the BBC studio. He “put them on a table covered with a doormat,” Attenborough remembers in the preface to his new book, Adventures of a Young Naturalist, “where they sat blinking in the intense lights.”"

"Some territories are used for feeding alone and these are defended outside the breeding season. The is a well-known example. . In winter male and female occupy separate territories for feeding only."

"... we have to remember that the description given us by Herodotus represents the entry of the into . It is the starting-point of the phoenix myth as we know it today, the foundation of the story told by Métral, and the only solid evidence we have concerning the phoenix itself."

"There are certain very small flies, known as . The females of this species carry a dagger at the end of the abdomen, a dual-purpose tubular dagger. This dagger is known as the , or in more common terms, the organ for laying eggs. The female ichneumon stabs a in the back and lays an egg in its body. The egg hatches, the grub emerges and feeds on the green fly."

"Roberts is a and an occasional columnist for the '. His command of research is prodigious, and his generosity with example is prodigal. He is good on the big picture, but he understands even better how to burnish an argument with gleaming detail. ... Roberts has a way of bringing marine disaster closer to home. The long summer vacation of British parliamentarians is not a reward for their legislative labours but a consequence of the , in which a choked with sewage and refuse became so vile that parliament's windows were hung with sheets soaked with bleach. ... He is good on the horrors of oil spills but he points out that the Gulf of Mexico's fishing fleets kill more marine life in a day than 's notorious ' disaster did in months. Oil companies are easy to demonise but the biggest source of oil pollution is either run off from land or directly injected by the two stroke engine of the recreational boat: the floating fuel and oils concentrate on the surface, poisoning the eggs and hungry larvae of hundreds of species."

"... every shark is a survivor of an extremely archaic race, older even than the , and there is no need to describe what everyone, and especially the ocean-going seamen, think of sharks."

"patterns were used to map dispersal routes of from 18 sites in the . The sites varied, both as sources and recipients of larvae, by an order of magnitude. It is likely that sites supplied copiously from “upstream” reef areas will be more resilient to recruitment overfishing, less susceptible to species loss, and less reliant on local management than places with little upstream reef. The mapping of connectivity patterns will enable the identification of beneficial management partnerships among nations and the design of networks of interdependent reserves."

"More than two centuries have passed since 's discovery. passed from American to French, then to hands, but it was never colonized, perhaps because it was too remote even by Pacific standards. It was briefly a U.S. Naval air command base in World War II and the debris of conflict still liter the islands and lagoons. But underwater, it remains much as Fanning described it. Palmyra is one of the last places on this planet where shallow water marine life is still as varied, rich, and abundant as it was in the eighteenth century. A diver stepping into the seas around this today is able to take a trip back in time to an age when fishing had not yet touched life in the sea."

"There are few better guides to the glories of s than Callum Roberts. Reef Life is a vibrant memoir of the joys, as well as the grind, of a research career beginning in the 1980s that has spanned a golden age of coral reef science. It is also a fine introduction to the ecology of reefs and the existential threats they now face. Roberts is well equipped for the task. He is chief scientific adviser to ', and has given us two of the best books in the last 15 years about the ecology of the sea and its fate in human hands: An Unnatural History of the Sea and Ocean of Life. Roberts revels in the details of life on a coral reef."

"Obviously, terrestrial mining does have very serious and significant impacts. But, largely speaking, they are much more controllable in a terrestrial setting. They are much more visible — so that third parties can verify them and make sure that mining companies are adhering to . Whereas, they would be far harder to see and verify and attribute to individual mines in the deep sea."

"I knew the moment that I put my head underwater in a coral reef in that there was no other career possibility for me."

"... when you take into account that third dimension of depth, then 97% of the volume of living space on Earth is made up by ocean."

"Man's interest in consuming , as well as in using their feathers for warmth and their fat for lighting and heating, was behind their early domestication. Two goose species were involved, the and the , and two ducks, the and the . Features of all wildfowl domestication include large size, a reduced number of tail and wing feathers, flightlessness, rapid maturation, an increased clutch size, long breeding season, loss of 'broodiness' (so that the technique of artificial incubation becomes necessary at an early stage), loss of aggression, a polygamous mating system, and the laying down of abdominal fat."