This reflective celebration of nature in the gentlest of seasons completes Crumley’s series

BOOK THE NATURE OF SUMMER

An Atlantic salmon surges upstream like a torpedo, with bankside alders forming a “guard of honour”. Midsummer sealsong ebbs and flows with the tides. That sudden splash in a flooded forest might be one of the beavers that have colonised the Trossachs. A St Kilda wren sings in a vast natural sea tunnel under the island of Hirta. Five northern brown argus butterflies settle on the digits of an outstretched hand.

Completing Jim Crumley’s wonderful seasonal ‘tetralogy’, this absorbing and reflective book draws on his memories of 32 summers spent tramping Scotland’s wild places, since he quit newspapers to become a full-time nature writer. And what memories!

Crumley has an easy, conversational style, confiding that he writes longhand with a fountain pen. Above all, he likes to be still in the landscape. Over and over, he returns to his favourite “perches” – a particular oak on a hillside, a rock at the head of a glen. His modus operandi is simple: sit, stare, listen. He talks with reverence about “nature letting me in a little more”.

But in the most passionate chapter, Crumley lets rip. Why is climate chaos being allowed to wreak havoc on our planet, and make a mockery of the four meteorological seasons?

Crumley shares terrifying data on the scale of climate change: dying glaciers, droughts, wildfires in the Arctic. “Numbers,” he says, “really are starting to scare the hell out of me.”

Ben Hoare, author and naturalist