He loved birds and green places, and the wind on the heath, and saw the brightness of the skirts of God Gravestone epitaph of W. H. Hudson
DO you know the name W. H. Hudson? Perhaps not. His books are largely forgotten. But then, what exactly was the name of the man who was a founder of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), a literary influence on Hemingway and judged by The Times on his death, a century ago in August 1922, to be 'unsurpassed as an English writer on nature'? Go to Argentina, where he was born in 1841 to American parents, and he was Guillermo Enrique Hudson-a town in Buenos Aires province is named for him. On the frontispiece of the US editions of Far Away and Long Ago, his passionate memoir of a wildlife-loving youth on the pampas, he becomes William Henry Hudson. In England, where he lived out the long and fruitful autumn of his life, he appeared in public as 'W. H. Hudson'. Except, that is, when he was writing the rags-to-riches potboiler Fan as Henry Harford.
In every sense, Hudson was difficult to pin down: a man of shifting name, shifting nationality and shifting authorial subjects. Above all, he was a bird man and the author of more than 40 books on ornithology. To him, birds were 'the most valuable things we have'.
He was a child of Nature. No sooner was he out of the wooden cot on his parents' sheep-and-cattle estancia than he was exploring the grassland of the Argentine, alone among the fauna and flora. In a crucial sense, Hudson remained a child his entire life, filled with awe and wonder at the natural world. On reaching adulthood, he would spend a whole day in spring simply admiring grass, 'nourishing my mind on it... The sight of it was all I wanted'.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der August 31, 2022-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
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A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
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We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
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Best of British
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Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
