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Jan 2, 2025 | 
countrylife.co.uk | John Lewis-Stempel
Green, pub, church, duck pond and rose-garlanded cottages: did the perfect English village ever exist? The English village. Perhaps the beguiling habitat closest to the English heart, the place in which everyone dreams of living.
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Dec 30, 2024 | 
countrylife.co.uk | John Lewis-Stempel
Quiet yourself and the distant hum of Nature’s parts connecting and working will soon come into focus. Silence comes in many forms.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
countrylife.co.uk | John Lewis-Stempel
Grey and bleak in midwinter, yet purple and exotic come high summer, our heathland is an unloved landscape that has become rarer than rainforest. Ah, ‘leafy Surrey’.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
countrylife.co.uk | John Lewis-Stempel
Once considered a vast, stretching terror-land synonymous with bog, the national perception of the ecologically invaluable moors has dramatically changed Odd places, moors.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | John Lewis-Stempel
Big Bird is back. Ridiculous, I acknowledge, to name a wild bird, but the same female grey heron has visited the fields behind the house for the past three autumns. She is easily distinguishable from others of her Ardea cinerea ilk because of a wonky leg, and while male and female grey heron look almost identical, the distaff side has shorter aigrettes, or crown feathers.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
countrylife.co.uk | John Lewis-Stempel
Beneath the crystal-clear, alien world of water lie the great piscean survivors of the Ice Age. The Lake District is a fish-spotter’s paradise. I confess that this is a fishy story.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
countrylife.co.uk | John Lewis-Stempel
A strange, amphibious land floating somewhere between earth and sky, East Anglia’s majestic wetlands remind us that our ancestors made arcadias in these isles. Broad — as in a large sheet of water. Open, expansive.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
greatbritishlife.co.uk | John Lewis-Stempel
In his latest book, John Lewis-Stempel immerses himself in this country’s distinctive habitats, from chalk downland to woodland, and fen to coastal cliffs. In this extract, he sings the praises of ‘The Queen of Trees’, the noble beech I knew a beech tree once. By which I mean I greeted her every day, a fingertip touch to her cold slate skin, as I climbed over the stile into the Herefordshire wood I managed, where our sheep, cattle and pigs roamed.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
countrylife.co.uk | John Lewis-Stempel
‘Most lovely of all’, the stately beech is our tallest native tree and creates a shaded environment that few plants can survive. If oak is the hail-fellow king of the English wood, beech is the ice queen.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
countrylife.co.uk | John Lewis-Stempel
Home to the iconic skylark, the chalk downlands are as colourful and botanically diverse as rainforest. Climbing up on Caburn hill, I could see the town lights of Lewes, but, on the summit, time had stopped still long before the age of electricity.
