Peter Marren

"... being rare often means your genetic resources are limited, and that makes you vulnerable to change. Small populations are also liable to be picked off by chance events, like a shrub growing up in front of you, or that new borehole for a new housing estate dug a few metres away. Conservation has recently come to the aid of many threatened plants, drawing many a little further back from the brink, but perhaps at some cost to their inherent wildness ... But the wise conservationist will aim at preventing flowers from reaching that state of extreme vulnerability in the first place."

"An average produces about five s of debris per per year. The get through this mountain of raw by sheer numbers. Fungi make up about 10% of the weight of living matter () in a wood. They are the weightiest component of all, bar the trees. You would require a convoy of dump trucks to remove the fungi of just a small copse. Yet all we see of them are their scattered in autumn."

"I can't say I have ever had much of a passion for proper . In fact, on about the only occasion I ever did any, I disliked the experience very much. I was about 23, and, wearying of ever finding a full-time job in , I got myself enrolled as a temporary member of staff at a northern university where I spent about four months on a cold, treeless fell, counting s. It was very boring and drove me to the bottle."

"England is said to be one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. It has lost most of its big wild animals. A thousand years ago in my village, which was quite a big place even then, s used to build their dams on my river. Perhaps a thousand years before that the villagers might have heard a wolf howl from a distant down of a rumour of bears in the forests that extended that extended for after mile. Even a hundred years ago, there would have been far more wild flowers, particularly at the edge of the cornfields, colourful blooms whose names attest to their former familiarity: , , ."

"The oak has long been a symbol of strength and, with the growth of the Royal Navy, also patriotic pride. It once fought our naval battles and carried our cargoes, framed our houses and spanned the roofs of cathedrals and barns, fed our pigs, tanned our leather and nourished our earliest industries."

"s of hunting camps built about 9,500 years ago indicate that by that time Britain had become densely wooded. At , in the is , bones and antlers from a variety of s were uncovered, including and in abundance, wild boar, (a prehistoric wild ox), , wolf, , , fox and hedgehog."

"Butterflies attract attention and cash because they are popular and attractive, and because there are rightly seen as symbols of wildlife in decline."