EDWARDIAN NATURE RAMBLES

Press, 29 October 1977, Page 19

EDWARDIAN NATURE RAMBLES

The i C^ Untr l °'/ ry of an Sardian Lady By Edith Holden. Michael Joseph with Webb and Bower, London. 186 pp. $12.45. (Reviewed by Lorna Buchanan)

. Warwickshire countryside south of Birmingham is still one of the loveliest parts of England. In 1906 it inspired Edith Holden to keep an illustrated nature diary which, published now in a facsimile edition, is enjoying a deserved reputation as P s the most charming book of 19/ 1.

Miss Holden’s opening quotation from Byron states her intention: “To hold converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unrolled.” Month by month she watched birds and animals, flowers and trees, through the cycle of the year. Nor was she content to enjoy only those things immediately before her.

Cycled to Packwood through Solihull and Bentley-heath,” runs her neatly written entry for February 24. “I passed a rookery on the way. The rooks were all very busy building up their old nests and a great deal of chatter they made over it ... In the garden of Packwood Hall adjoining the churchyard the borders were full of large clumps of single snowdrops. I brought away a great bunch . . . Rode home seven miles, in a storm of sleet and snow." No mean feat for a woman of 35, clutching a bunch of flowers, on a bone-shaker bicycle.

A few days earlier she had been up at 5.57 a.m. to see a partial eclipse of the moon and to watch a tiny blue-cap tit take possession of the cocoa-nut shell she used as a bird feeder, “squatting in the shell, sparring and hissing at a great tit who came at him with open w’ing and beak.”

A few days later she recorded: “I had to carry my cycle nearly quarter of a mile down a steep muddy ford. . . On these sheltered banks I found numbers of the small celandine

blossom, and the first flowers of the little strawberry-leaved cinquefoil.” This rough going only inspired her to insert a little Wordsworth in her diary, adorned with drawings of the flowers she had found. “To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.” So the diary continues for almost 200 pages until it ends with a neatly printed list of “Wild Flowers found in the neighbourhood of Olton, Warwickshire” — 216 different flowers she found, and she recorded their common names and scientific names. She added a list of local birds — 77 of them, again with scientific names.

A good many of the flowers and birds are included in. her magnificent water-colour illustrations. Miss Holden had a darting eye for the detail and shades of flowers and leaves; the Italian printers of this book have done full justice to her art. Miss Holden’s life ended sadly. She moved to London and in 1911, aged 40, she married Ernest Smith, a sculptor living in Chelsea. She died — tragically but, perhaps, appropriately — in 1920 when she accidently drowned in the Thames at Kew while gathering buds from chestnut trees. Her diary, after 70 years, is a charming reminder that an obscure but talented lady with a bicycle could be a remarkable amateur naturalist. “Let the blow fall soon or late,” she printed neatly in October, quoting R. L. Stevenson, "let what will be o’er me; ■ Give the face of earth around and the road before me.”