The English Love Affair with Nature
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c. 350 BC Aristotle’s History of Animals
c. 50-70 Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica
c. 77-79 Pliny the Elder’s Natural History
c. 615-630 Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae
12th century Aberdeen Bestiary
1251 Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora describes and illustrates Crossbill irruption
1382 Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls
1543 Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
1544 William Turner’s Avium praecipuarum, the first printed bird book
1551 William Turner’s New Herbal
1597 John Gerard’s Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes
1609 Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia Nova
1653 Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler
1664 John Evelyn’s Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees
1666 Christopher Merrett’s Pinax Rerum Naturalium Britannicarum
1678 John Ray completes and publishes Francis Willughby’s Ornithology
1687 Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
1691 John Ray’s The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation
1712 Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine is used at a coalworks
1713 William Derham’s Physico-Theology
1724-1736 William Kent introduces naturalistic gardening at Chiswick House
1756 Sir Hans Sloane’s natural history collection, origin of the Natural History Museum, is displayed in Montagu House
1757 Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
1761 The Bridgwater Canal opens
1762 George Stubbs paints a portrait of the horse Whistlejacket
1764 James Hargreaves invents the Spinning Jenny
1768 Capt. James Cook takes command of HMS Endeavour
1771 Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland
1773 The Inclosure Act enables landowners to remove rights of access. (Many further Acts between 1845 and 1882)
1779 Samuel Crompton invents the Spinning Mule
1782 William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770
1785 James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth
1789 Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne
1790 Richard Brookes’s Art of Angling
1797-1804 Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds
1798 William Wordsworth/Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads
1802 George Montagu’s Ornithological Dictionary
” William Paley’s Natural Theology
1804 Sir Joseph Banks and John Wedgwood found The Horticultural Society of London (now the RHS)
1807 The Geological Society is founded
1813 Royal College of Surgeons opens museum of John Hunter’s comparative anatomy collection
1815 The Apothecaries Act forces medical students to study botany
” William ‘Strata’ Smith’s geological map of Britain
1820 John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery
1821 Mary Anning sells a fossil Plesiosaurus skeleton for £200
” John Constable paints The Hay Wain
1822 Richard Martin’s Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act
” William Buckland describes ‘pre-Flood’ fossils from Kirkdale Cavern
1824 Richard Martin, William Wilberforce and others found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (now the RSPCA)
1825 George Stephenson’s Locomotion for the Stockton and Darlington Railway
” Gideon Mantell describes Iguanodon
1826 Sir Stamford Raffles and others found the Zoological Society of London
1830-1833 Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology
1835 The Cruelty to Animals Act bans badger-baiting, dog-fighting, etc. (further Acts of the same name in 1849 and 1876)
” The Museum of Practical Geology opens in Jermyn Street (becoming the Geological Museum in South Kensington in 1935)
” The Geological Survey of Great Britain is founded
1839 Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle
1840 Kew Gardens becomes the national botanical garden
1843 William Yarrell’s A History of British Birds
1848 Robinson Thwaites founds the Vulcan Iron Works, Bradford
1851 Sir Edwin Landseer paints Monarch of the Glen
1854 Richard Owen and Waterhouse Hawkins display the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs
1859 Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species
c. 1860 First commercially prepared dog food
1863 Henry Walter Bates’s The Naturalist on the River Amazons
1864 The ironmaker Bolckow Vaughan of Middlesbrough is the largest company so far formed, with share capital of £2.5 million
1869 Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago
” Sea Birds Preservation Act
1874 Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd
1875 Frances Power Cobbe founds the Victoria Street Society (now the National Anti-Vivisection Society)
1876 William Morris prints his Snakeshead textile pattern
1877 Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty
1881 Alfred Waterhouse’s new Natural History Museum building opens in South Kensington
1885 The first conservation society, the Selborne Society for the Protection of Birds, Plants and Pleasant Places, is founded
1889 Emily Williamson founds the Society for the Protection of Birds (now the RSPB)
1895 Octavia Hill, Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley found the National Trust
” William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World
” British Balneological and Climatological Society is founded
” Louis Lumière’s film Pelicans, Lion, and Tigers at London Zoological Gardens
1897 Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach founds the Himmelhof commune (near Vienna)
1900 First issue of Health and Efficiency magazine
1902 Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit
1903 The Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire, (now Fauna & Flora International) is founded
” Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Nina Douglas-Hamilton found the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society
1906 Henry Scherren’s Popular Natural History
1907 National Trust Act
” Robert Baden-Powell holds first Scout camp (on Brownsea Island)
1908 Small Holdings and Allotments Act
” Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows
1910 G.E.M. Skues’s Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream (fishing on the Itchen)
1912 Charles Rothschild founds the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves (now the Wildlife Trusts)
1913 The RHS holds the first Chelsea Flower Show
1917 D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form
1927 Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter
” Edward Grey’s The Charm of Birds
1932 Benny Rothman, Ewan MacColl and others lead the Kinder Mass Trespass
” Richard Hall’s The Art of Mountain Tramping
” Max Nicholson founds the British Trust for Ornithology
1935 Edmonton Lido opens
1937 Frederick Warne publishes The Observer’s Book of British Birds
1942 Ronald Lockley’s Shearwaters
1943 David Lack’s Life of the Robin
1945 Collins begins the New Naturalist series with Butterflies by E. B. Ford
1946 Peter Scott founds Severn Wildfowl Trust (now Wildfowl and Wetland Trust)
” The Soil Association is founded
1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act
1953 David Attenborough’s first natural history TV series, The Pattern of Animals
1954 Peterson, Mountfort and Hollom’s Birds of Britain and Europe
1955 W.G. Hoskins’s The Making of the English Landscape
1956 Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals
” Hans and Lotte Haas’s Diving to Adventure on BBC television
” Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians
1958 Armand and Michaela Denis’s On Safari TV series
1960 RSPB membership reaches 10,000
1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
” Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean start the Findhorn Foundation
1965 The first British national trail, the Pennine Way, is completed
1966 James Hill’s film Born Free, based on Joy Adamson’s book
1969 Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield
” Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are founded (in North America)
” Robin Hanbury-Tenison and others found Survival International
1971 Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man
1972 Richard Adams’s Watership Down
1973 Gerard Morgan-Grenville founds Centre for Alternative Technology
1976 John Seymour’s The Guide to Self-Sufficiency
1979 First RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch
1982 Culpeper Community Garden is founded in Islington
1997 RSPB membership reaches 1,000,000
1999 Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty is founded
2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act
2004 Hunting Act
2005 First BBC Springwatch series
2006 Dave Goulson founds the Bumblebee Conservation Trust
