Restoring the Wild, A guide to the restoration, creation and management of meadow and other wild vegetation. By Donald MacIntyre. Marlborough, The Crowood Press.  2024.  ISBN 978-0-7198-4438-6  &  9-780719-844386   272pp. £24

The author is owner of the UK’s largest producer of native seed, and this book represents the fruits of his 44+ years of sieving and refining his wildflower seeds. Don would be too modest to state that he received the Prince of Wales’s feathers for his outstanding work and advice. Travellers along motorways and dual-carriageways are often oblivious of his seed mixes that blossom through spring and summer and increase the biodiversity of verges, and the countryside in general.  Emorsgate Seeds are the go-to place for meadow mixes help to boost biodiversity.

The book has 16 chapters of which the last on Restoration Species is a little less than half the book. There are 224 angiosperms and fern species described, each nominated as either native, archaeophyte, or naturalised neophyte, and most with colourful photographs, and in some species with photographs of different stages in their growth, what they look like in cultivation, in full flower and after flowering. The diversity of geraniums and cirsiums are well explained. Who would know, unless you were a grower, that the seeds of Wood Anemone have recalcitrant seeds (intolerant of drying).

One of the unique points of this book is that many of the species are illustrated with close-ups of their seed – and their morphological structure is fascinating. There is no other go-to book for this information, or such a book about the role of wildflower species in bringing back nature. The author’s introduction is based on his botanical scientific background, and he recounts the progressive decline the flora of the British Isles, including 97% loss of species-rich meadows and calcareous grasslands to 1984, and 80% loss of lowland heath to 1980. His Emorsgate Seeds, many of which have derived from surviving ancient meadows, have ultimately helped to make a big difference, but in no way enough to redress the catastrophic anthropogenic loss that has occurred in this country.

The book has a very serious scientific look at life of wildflowers, starting with the 1,400 species, rising to ‘around 2,000 species if apomictic ‘micro-species’ of apomictic genera (Taraxacum, Hieracium, Rubus) are also included’. Whatever popular book would describe DAFOR rating (that field ecologists use daily) is for abundance, but here.

For buyers, this book walks you through the different habitats that you might wish to create, and these break down into ten categories:  Neutral Lowland Meadow and Pasture, Calcareous Meadow and Pasture, Sandy Soils, Floodplain, Upland Meadow and Pasture, Moor and Heath, Wayside and Tussock, Hedgerow and Scrub, Woodland Ground Flora and Coastal habitats. The book is not only a background on how wildflowers have been used for bringing back nature, but for practitioners on estates, groundsmen, landscape gardeners, council workers and ordinary gardeners who wish to bring some biodiversity sunshine into their gardens. It is therefore a niche book.  There are many references to further information and classic botanical texts, a Latin Index (no English one), a glossary and a comprehensive table listing all the species showing sowing rates for each habitat. A unique, classic, key work and highly recommended.

Is A River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane. 2025. London, Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books. 375pp. Hardback £25.00

Readers will have probably heard of this book as it was the Book of Week during early 2025. It was written by the author over three and a half years having visited three main rivers, one in Ecuador, one in India and one in Canada. The author is a Fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge, and has written or co-authored nine other books.

However for this book he has other co-authors, as he says ‘I wish to say plainly’… ‘written with the rivers that run through its pages….They are my co-authors.’ He also wishes to make it clear that he refers to rivers as living, as in ‘river who flow’, rather than river that flow.

Macfarlane has as his main aim to fathom out ‘Is a river alive’. He also questions ‘Does a forest have a mind?’, for he is forever in forests through which rivers flow. He reminds us that we are all living in a watershed. Too true. Most villages, towns and cities are based around an original water source, and he refers to London’s now lost rivers, ‘ghost rivers’ 20 lost in London, others in New York….. These are ‘imprisoned’ rivers that have died. In Europe over one million barriers he says have been erected over watercourses, and he says that the body of water contained in the Three Gorges dam in China has ‘measurably slowed the rotation of the Earth’. There are copious references (and index), though not attributed to particular texts, three maps and a few black and white photographs.

So in this book we have more on the impact of man on the ecology of watersheds and the demise of rivers, and the people that live in the forest, than the nitty-gritty answers of are these rivers alive, are forests mindful, and is there any evidence of sentience by the rivers? 

The author spends a lot of time with people of the forests, how they have endured the loss of forest, gold-mining,  logging, expropriation, draining of wetlands and forests, canalisation….. etc. Some of his contacts with people are described in a verbatim manner, better for the radio, than in a book and not addressing the core questions.  

I would like to have the author cut to the chase with the results of his investigations. I would have like to have seen more on the evidence of sentience rather than the plight of people in the forests subjected to loss of their intimate environment which has been told many times over.  Yes, people in watersheds have always revered the water, just like sun and stars as stable entities. Yes, rivers are essentially alive. Most keep on flowing. It’s what they do.  

As for my own experience I have travelled the Amazon and its tributaries and am aware of its vagaries and its persistence, and need, and obligation to flow (melting snow water). It certainly has presence, standing and one has to be very respectful, and it makes its presence irrevocably known. Sure it is a living body of water and you need to be aware of that.

Rivers are given the right to flow by us, not to be abstracted or polluted. If they are to be ‘protected’ in the world we have chosen to live in, we have to speak for them as they do not have a voice. It is our anthropomorphic choice and we have chosen that avenue to protect one of our natural assets; an essential one.