BOOKS, RADIO AND TV
This love letter to our native wildflowers is a book to treasure
What to read, watch and listen to.
In 2012, the wild plant conservation charity Plantlife published Our Vanishing Flora, highlighting the loss of wildflowers from across Great Britain since 1953. The report showed that a staggering
97% of wildflower meadows have been lost since the 1930s, prompting Plantlife’s patron HRH The Prince of
Wales to call for the urgent creation of new ones. The Coronation Meadows initiative was launched in 2013, with the aim of creating at least one new meadow in every county, using local, native seed from those small fragments of meadows and grasslands that still survive.
Hugo Rittson Thomas’s captivating book is a visual celebration of these meadows, and is very much a book of wildflowers for everyone. Pairing enigmatic photographic landscapes of 20 selected Coronation Meadows across the UK with zoomed-in flat lays and herbaria-like arrangements of key wildflower species – tufted vetch, field scabious, great burnet and a surprising number of exotic-looking orchids – it is a suitably rich and colourful homage to the vital diversity and beauty of the UK’s native grasslands.
Produced in partnership with Plantlife and punctuated by illuminating commentary from Dr Trevor Dines,
Dan Pearson, Nicholas Coleridge, Miranda Brooks, Alan Titchmarsh and HRH The Prince of Wales among others, this sumptuous tome is a love letter to our native wildflowers but also a conservational clarion call. Preserve our wildflower meadows; protect their future. Sonya Patel Ellis, botanical writer