How to See Nature… why this book is in Wander

I should probably begin with a confession.

When I first picked up How to See Nature, I wasn’t convinced it was the book I wanted for Wander.

I had asked my friend, who owns a local bookshop, to recommend something about wildflowers and noticing nature. In my head, I think I was imagining a beautiful little book filled with photographs: something you could slip into a bag, take on a walk and use to identify whatever was growing beside the path.

She suggested this.

I opened it, saw a lot of writing, some rather long words and not nearly as many pictures as I had imagined, and thought: I’m not sure this is it.

But I trust her recommendations, so I started reading.

And she was completely right.

This book will not tell you the name of every flower you pass. It is not a step-by-step spotting guide, and it does not give nature to you in neat little facts beside lovely colour photographs.

Instead, it does something much more interesting.

It changes what you notice.

Paul Evans writes about gardens, weeds, streetlights, rivers, woods, wasteland, moors and the wildlife living in all the untidy spaces between them. He looks closely at things most of us walk past without a second thought and reveals just how much is going on.

There is an enormous amount of detail. Scientific detail, history, folklore, art, poetry and the author’s own encounters with the natural world all wind around one another.

Sometimes you may need to read a sentence twice.

Sometimes you may come across a word you have never seen before.

And sometimes the book takes us into sadder territory. It explores the damage people have done to the natural world: artificial light confusing moths and other night-time creatures, disappearing habitats, struggling species and the knock-on effects that happen when one small part of an ecosystem is disturbed.

It does not pretend that everything in nature is lovely and flourishing.

But it never left me feeling that the answer was to know less or look away.

It made me want to pay more attention.

Because the biggest thing I took from this book is that you do not need to travel into the countryside or plan a long woodland walk to find nature.

It is happening under streetlights.

It is growing at the edge of car parks and railway lines.

It is nesting in the enormous tangle of brambles next door to my house.

It is beside the road, along the river, in the garden and in the tiny patch of green you usually pass while thinking about something else.

Nature is not only somewhere we go.It is everywhere we already are.

And if you are the sort of person who looks up one small thing on Google, then emerges several hours later having accidentally become an expert, I think you are going to love this book.

I am definitely that person.

On holiday in Greece, I heard cicadas outside our hotel room at bedtime and decided to look up what one actually looked like.

A perfectly reasonable question.

By one o’clock in the morning, I knew an entirely unreasonable number of cicada facts and was fully prepared to bore everybody with them over breakfast.

How to See Nature has that same wonderful rabbit-hole quality. You can begin with a moth or a weed and find yourself travelling through science, history, literature and human behaviour.

It is factual, but also poetic. Detailed, but full of wonder. It reminds us that almost anything becomes fascinating when somebody helps us look at it properly.

You do not have to read it from beginning to end.

You do not need to understand every reference or remember every creature.

Choose a chapter that sounds interesting. Read a few pages with your tea. Let yourself follow one of its tangents. Put it down and come back another day.

Teabreaks don’t expire, and neither does this book.

It is here because Wander is not about becoming an expert naturalist or adding another worthy activity to your list.

It is about curiosity.

It is about lifting your eyes from the route in front of you and seeing what has been there all along.

It is about allowing yourself twenty minutes to read something fascinating for no more practical reason than: I wanted to know.

So please, pick a chapter. Any chapter.

Pop the kettle on, use the good mug and let Paul Evans take you down a rabbit hole.

You may look at the world a little differently when you come back.