Playlist
This week Ian McMillan presents a slice of Vintage Verb as he burrows into the ground to unearth an edition of The Verb devoted to the natural world, first broadcast in 2004.
Ian examines how we respond to the natural environment; how we talk about it, and most importantly how we write about it. Joining him is Britain's foremost nature writer Richard Mabey, author of Food for Free and the monumental Flora Britannica. Richard reads from a new essay for The Verb about the nature of writing about nature.
William Fiennes, author of The Snow Geese is a compulsive walker and Ian joins him for a brisk constitutional by Lake Windermere.
They fall into conversation about why several of the finest writers about the natural world - William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau and Edward Thomas - found inspiration and rhythm by walking through it.
In another new piece Elspeth Barker, who lives in a farmhouse under the big skies of Norfolk, teases out her relationship with the natural world, whilst in a poet's garden, Michael Longley's in Belfast, Ian encounters a monumentally inspiring tree.
