Flora Britannica

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Dandelions have always been loved by many people for their beauty as well as usefulness, and are mentioned in many stories. Some years after his mother’s death, exhausted from completing Flora Britannica, he had a breakdown. He suffered auditory and visual hallucinations, and was hospitalised at St Andrew’s mental health facility in Northampton. send us your photos of bees or other insects on dandelions (and don’t forget to say where they are from) – or share them on our social media

Flora Britannica by Mabey Richard - AbeBooks

India forms an important segment of what is known as the Oriental, or Sino-Indian, biogeographic region, which extends eastward from India to include mainland and much of insular Southeast Asia. Its fauna are numerous and highly diverse. Mammals Dandelion flowers stare up at the sun and follow it around, they are yellow and each of them is a sun in miniature”. Geoffery Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora A Small Tortoiseshell butterfly feeding on a Dandelion. This butterfly needs help – it is in rapid decline. (Photo courtesy of @CreweCitizen) The new nature writing spats, Mabey says, made them all acutely self-conscious. But later, over a glass of white wine, sitting outside for a coronavirus-age, al fresco lunch, he adds, “What I will say is that in much modern nature writing there is a tendency to view the natural world as a kind of magic globe in which to view oneself. I judged a competition recently and out of 30 or so entries just two were about the natural world and the rest were about the people who had written them.”Have you seen our new video Lawnageddon ? It’s the story of one man who dreams of the ‘perfect lawn’, before he wakes up to the importance of Dandelions for nature … have a look It is almost impossible to get a sense of life in the Mabey household because the spectre of the father in his bed dominates all impressions of the family. Here was a gang of arty, neurotic children who all went on to do interesting things – but what inspired them is a mystery. There is no talk of a shared imaginative world, or games or books. By contrast Mabey’s childhood friends were “desperately important” to him: “My whole sense of being was with the friends I ran with.” He still knows many of them today. He loved TV work – its speed and camaraderie, the rhythm of the day, “the ruinous affairs that would flair up and collapse”. He was bookish but sexy, perched on the roof of a canal boat with an unnamed lady friend, or squatting on his haunches to read something out of a 17th-century herbal. But the shows were ahead of their time. urn:lcp:florabritannica0000mabe:epub:a7e89a61-e663-4b55-8d31-d050efd0e701 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier florabritannica0000mabe Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2m2n10wcfd Invoice 1652 Isbn 1856193772 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9943 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000162 Openlibrary_edition Of some 2,000 species of fish in India, about one-fifth live in fresh water. Common edible freshwater fish include catfish and several members of the carp family, notably the mahseer, which grows up to 6.5 feet (2 metres) and 200 pounds (90 kg). Sharks are found in India’s coastal waters and sometimes travel inland through major estuaries. Commercially valuable marine shellfish species include shrimps, prawns, crabs, lobsters, pearl oysters, and conchs.

Flora, Fauna, Ecosystems | Britannica India - Flora, Fauna, Ecosystems | Britannica

Vegetation in the Himalayas can be generally divided into a number of elevation zones. Mixed evergreen-deciduous forests dominate the foothill areas up to a height of 5,000 feet (1,500 metres). Above that level subtropical pine forests make their appearance, followed by the Himalayan moist-temperate forests of oak, fir, deodar ( Cedrus deodara), and spruce. The highest tree zone, consisting of alpine shrubs, is found up to an elevation of about 15,000 feet (4,500 metres). Rhododendrons are common at 12,000 feet (3,700 metres), above which occasional junipers and alpine meadows are encountered. Zones overlap considerably, and there are wide transitional bands. Animal life wait for then to arrive and then do not spray them – start by not cutting your lawn and see what comes up. It might be a lot more than just dandelions – daisies, clover and other wildflowers may also spring up when they get the chance. Covering the native and naturalised plants of England, Scotland and Wales, this book sets out to fulfil the role of a cultural flora, rather than a botanical one. It is an account of the role of wild plants on social life, arts, custom and landscape. Richard Mabey, the renowned author and broadcaster, spent five years researching the work and has collated the results of a nationwide celebration of over 1,000 species. Each Dandelion flower is a miracle of nature’s engineering and is made up of up to 200 individual ‘ray florets’. It turns to face the sun throughout the day, which can help you tell the time.So I would hope that we might get our act together. But I think it’s very unlikely, because no species has ever acted as a species. Nothing in the natural world does – they act in terms of their own genes, and their families. The sense of species awareness is unique to humans, but whether it really has any firm bounds in our deep psychological make-up, I don’t know. It probably doesn’t.” Then there’s the more serious depression, which is not so much about me, but about the world, and I think that it’s creative – or at least, I hope it is – because I suppose I’m a bit of a contrarian about the idea that nature is always there to make you well.” Tropical thorn forests occupy areas in various parts of the country, though mainly in the northern Gangetic Plain and southern peninsular India. Those forests generally grow in areas with less than 24 inches (600 mm) of rain but are also found in more humid areas, where deciduous forests have been degraded because of unregulated grazing, felling, and shifting agriculture. In those areas, such xerophytic (drought-tolerant) trees as species of acacia (babul and catechu) and Butea monosperma predominate. A cross the garden, Polly is putting out lunch, with three brightly coloured blankets for the knees. Did it feel like a different kind of falling in love, with her? Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth

Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey | Waterstones

Less poetically, as many children have discovered, you can also use it to make a ‘raspberry’ or farting noise. Here are the instructions given by Mabey: ‘‘Take a long stalk of dandelion, remove the head, and split one downwards approximately half an inch. Place the split end inside your mouth and blow gently. A raspberry should be made”. Dandelions love outdoor sun and will close up and die if cut and put in a vase. The flowers close up on cold and cloudy days. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-05-10 16:14:07 Associated-names Gibbons, Bob, 1949-; Jones, Gareth Lovett; Common Ground (Organization) Autocrop_version 0.0.12_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40475701 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier It is unique in that it is not a botanical flora but a cultural one - an account of the role of wild plants in social life, arts, custom and landscape. It is also unique in that information has been supplied by the people themselves. Five years of intensive original research have aroused popular interest and 'grassroots' involvement on an exceptional scale. People all over Britain - both rural and urban - have been encouraged to record and celebrate the cultural dimensions of their own flora, and to send their memories and anecdotes, observations and regional knowledge to Flora Britannica.

Dandelions are food for at least 46 different types of moth (and that’s just the bigger types) whose ‘caterpillars’ munch on the leaves, stem or roots as youngsters Mabey once described himself as an epiphyte: an organism that grows and feeds on the surface of another. Upon his release from St Andrew’s, he and his sister cleared the family home. They could not get any local charities to take the furniture, so they burned it in the garden. At that point, instead of going “to a kind of halfway house” he went to stay with childhood friends in Blakeney in Norfolk. As he recovered, they introduced him to a friend called Polly Lavender who’d grown up with a close-knit family on the Norfolk Broads. She had an unusual vivacity and a love of nature that matched his. She also has four children, and grandchildren; Mabey says he never wanted any of his own. A hungry bumble bee arrives on an uncurling Dandelion – Photo courtesy of George Pilkington– see lots of things you can do to help nature in your garden including George’s great bumblebee nest boxes at https://nurturing-nature.co.uk In his ability to look very hard, and very closely, at the natural world, Mabey has something in common with Andrew Marvell, whose retreat to a Yorkshire country house after the execution of Charles I produced two years of startling nature poetry. Marvell derives terrific energy from the act of looking, in the knowledge he will never truly be one with his surroundings. There is more at work in his poems than solace, or escape. As a young man Mabey was inspired by JA Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), a dazzling study of the bird written from a place of personal obsession, and by Kenneth Allsop’s columns in the Sunday Times. But the “new nature writing” – that bestselling form with its intense first-person narrations – would probably not exist without him. Had his mother read much of his work by the time she died? “She read some of it. But I wish I’d been more confident about her. She was a not-well-read, working-class woman,” he is pushing the words past a lump in his throat, “and I undervalued that bit of her, and that’s bad.”