I am grateful to the graphic designer Parul Babbar for her beautiful cover design for The English Love Affair with Nature.

The cover incorporates various images. There is subtle use of an image of by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel. I’m curious about the down-below nature of the sea-creatures, along with its background nature (collective unconscious?) in the image; the original is bright, beautiful, and as always in Haeckel fascinated by symmetry. The British Isles feature in there too, along with Charles Darwin and a Southern White Admiral that I photographed.

Other elements include what I think may well be the red, white and blue of the union flag, the swirling love-letter romance of the typeface used for the title, and the rose, which might be the Tudor rose of England. The balance of man and butterfly, naturalist and natural beauty across the title may also not be an accident, I imagine.