Read this book and you’ll see why our meadows are so precious

This book is a portrait of one man’s meadow. Our now almost vanished meadowland, with its tapestry of wildflowers, abundant wildlife and rich human history, has long attracted English writers. Modern meadow books are usually copiously illustrated in colour to reach the coffee-table market, but John Lewis-Stempel bravely relies on lively elegant prose. His thoughtful, discursive, often humorous and always enjoyable narrative conveys a vital message, for one cannot overemphasise how important are these last ancient meadows.

They are a cultural heritage and vital store of biodiversity, not least the genetic variation of grasses, clovers and other forage plants. A store of leaves, seeds and invertebrate ‘mini-beasts’, they are a feeding ground for birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. They provide important ecological ‘goods and services’, locking up carbon and maintaining health and integrity of soil, water and the varied buglife that predates crop pests. And, in addition to fodder, wildflower-rich meadows yield honey as well as medicinal, dye, symbolic and other useful plants.

Meadowland, an extended essay in loose diary form, traces across a single year the changing face of John Lewis-Stempel’s own working hay-meadow. His holding, framed by what he calls the ‘forbidding wall dam’ of the Black Mountains, lies just into Herefordshire. The slightly acid soil, derived from Devonian rocks, is red and the shingle- and alder-fringed River Escley, haunt of otters and kingfishers, forms one boundary.

No urban dreamer but a practical farmer, the author loves his land and knows its value to him, the local community and the wider human population. Well-steeped in the English tradition of writing about nature and the land, he dissects the minutiae of his field, mixing intimate observation of the web of life in the meadow, its links to farming and the history of the site with practical detail, absorbing the reader into his farm experiences and broader ecological perspectives.