The Natural History of Selborne

Gilbert White’s famous and seminal text of the natural life around his Hampshire home. Introduced by James Lovelock, and illustrated throughout with Eric Ravilious woodcuts. This book is reprinting and will be available again in June 2018. Any orders will be recorded and sent out then. Introduction: James Lovelock ‘Men like him enjoyed the countryside but also tried to understand it through the open and familiar form of science . . . everything from astronomy to zoology inclusively, so that solar and lunar eclipses enthralled them just as much as the appearance of that rare and strangely colourful bird the hoopoe.’ JAMES LOVELOCK

A century before Charles Darwin, decades before the French Revolution, Gilbert White began his lifelong habit of measuring and observing the world around his Hampshire home. Daily rainfall levels and temperature shifts were recorded with home-made instruments. Bird song and seasonal migrations were noted. The feeding habits of frogs, bats and mice were jotted into his diaries and nature journals, as were the simple delights he felt hearing a cricket in the meadow or a blackbird in the hedgerows. The extraordinary detail of the natural history he described has given us, two hundred years later, a glimpse into ecosystems untouched by industry and an account of how changes in global climate can affect local weather patterns. Gilbert White is now considered England’s first ecologist. The Natural History of Selborne is one the most published books in the English language. Yet the most enduring quality of his writing is the spirit of curiosity that bounds across every page, inspiring us to explore the abundance of life at our doorsteps and around our parishes.