The English Love Affair with Nature

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This extract is illustrated with images not present in the book.

When I set out to write this book, I soon found that although everyone seemed to agree that the English were in love with nature, nobody seemed to know why. When I started to inquire why we were in love, two surprising things happened. The first was that I found there were many reasons, sometimes overlapping. At times I felt like a stork, pushing more and more sticks into an already high and tottering nest-pile, as I found yet another small detail and wove it as best I could into the narrative. The second was that quite a few things about the English suddenly made sense for the first time. This richness gives me hope that the story told here may be of some interest.

A challenge in writing about any love affair is that people want to know the story, but not to be burdened with too many facts – yet the facts are what make the story real and concrete. Worse, the facts alone can be dry – it is the emotion which is central, but the bump and grind are not easy to put into words after the event. Best, probably, is to give enough detail to bring the personalities to life, and say just enough about the passion to enable the reader to imagine the rest. Thus, both on the facts and the feelings, it is easy to go too far. I’ve tried to meet this challenge by describing the history and prehistory of our love affair with nature rather plainly.

One small difficulty is worth mentioning, because it is impossible to avoid: the hopeless confusion between England, Britain, and the United Kingdom. People often say ‘English’ when they mean ‘British’, and vice versa; the meanings of these words have shifted greatly in the past few decades; and we don’t even have a proper adjective to go with ‘United Kingdom’. However, most of the people in this story are from England, and I’d suggest that the love affair has more of an English than a British character.

It should be obvious, too, that many interpretations are possible when it comes to talking about influences or even causes. I have tried to provide straightforward interpretations while not going beyond what the evidence, which is often hard to quantify, seems to show. Over two centuries or more, too, the number of people involved has become enormous, so selection is necessary. I hope I have not left out too many of your favourites.

Finally, I have narrated some personal experiences in my own relationship with nature, to give an impression of what it is like for an individual to be swept up in a national love affair; for, of course, nations cannot love: they consist of the hearts, minds and bodies of their people.

Ian Alexander
October 2014