For his most recent Sunday Book Review, Mark shows his readers his Aurelian side.No, not the sad, Berlin-bound Aurelian as depicted in Nabokov’s short story of that name; the joyous Aurelian, as in the great tradition of butterfly enthusiasts.
Earlier this month, Mark took Professor Dieter Helm’s new “Green and Prosperous Land; a Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside” as the subject for his Sunday book review.
Melissa Harrison’s Seasons Anthology quartet has brought me many things since I first began reading it – among which have been delight, rejuvenation, and spiritual guidance, to mention only a few. It has also brought me into an awareness of the work of a number of truly superb contemporary nature writers, prominent among whom is Caroline Greville.
Yaffle. The very first time I heard this widely used British colloquial name for the Green Woodpecker I was instantly taken by it. Thought to have been derived in the Eighteenth Century from the call made by the species, yaffle so well expresses the Zeitgeist of this ground-loving member of the woodpecker family that once learned it’s difficult to call it by its official common name.