Macdonald & Gates, Orchard: A Year in England's Eden

 I'm conflicted in kinds of ways about this lovely book Orchard: A Year in England's Eden, by naturalists and wildlife documentarians Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates.

(And yes, I'm calling it off the top "this lovely book," so I'm favourably inclined, and yet I have complaints! Always with the complaints. I should try being happier.)

Nature writing is very much my jam, as the kids used to say. It's rare that a month goes by without my reading a book of nature writing, and as it happens, I came to Orchard after having just finished the celebrated Roger Deakin's Wildwood. To be clear, Wildwood isn't my favourite nature writing book, so I've spent some time in the linked review moaning about the reasons it wasn't. Orchard takes a completely different tack from Wildwood, and yet somehow I didn't end up any more pleased, because I got annoyed for reasons that never would've crossed my mind in relation to Deakin. Basically, Wildwood was nature writing, even though a reader could reasonably have wished Deakin had handles some things differently; I'm not convinced that Orchard is actually nature writing, even if it has all the trappings of nature writing.

Praise and summary first: this book stands as something like an almanac, sharing with us month by month a year in a particular, singular, special old orchard in the Malvern Hills of Herefordshire. The descriptions of various species, moments, encounters, and ecological linkages are clear, sharp, and neatly rendered. I've come away from it wanting more than ever to visit such a place, and to see what I can do in my own area to contribute to the kinds of efforts depicted there. Orchard is an inspiring book, in other words, and its tools of inspiration include how well its authors render the orchard's beauty, and how well they render its ecological intricacy.

Reviewers have generally been seriously positive about this book, and where they haven't been positive, their own commenters have tended to complain about the reviewer's complaints. When Mark Avery, for example, objected that the cover depicts a bird with the shape of a Greater Spotted Woodpecker but the plumage of a Lesser Spotted, commenter Susan Kessler replied, "Did Tim get up on the wrong side of the bed? Such a curmudgeonly response to the book's dust jacket! It's a lovely stylized picture, not a botanically accurate illustration after all." And it did win the Richard Jefferies Award for Nature Writing, so to heck with Mark and me.

But as I've said before, no: I struggle to admit when I'm wrong. I'll say my piece, and see how it sounds.

The great joy of reading nature writing, for me, lies partly in its sense of history and community. When I read one book, I'm reading others at the same time, because it'll remind me of other places and species and ecologies, or maybe even the same ones, that I've encountered through other nature writers. Orchard has excellent science, as the occasional footnotes can attest, but I don't think the book cites or mentions a single other nature writer, certainly not a contemporary one.

For example, Orchard spends some time early on talking about the apple forests of Kazakhstan, so that we get a sense of the apple's history. Later on, the whole month of July (with zero content from England itself, which I found both unnecessary and deeply strange!) is spent in eastern Europe, with Benedict Macdonald encountering the richnesses of village life and orchards in that part of the world. As it happens, Roger Deakin's Wildwood covered precisely those same subjects 17 years earlier, even if through happenstance I'd only just finished reading his book. I'm not saying that Orchard plagiarized from Deakin--in fact I'm confident that they didn't--but that I regretted that Orchard has a great sense of natural history's science, but no obvious sense for natural history's writing.

To some extent, it reads as if its writers were inventing nature writing, without any sense that apples, orchards, trees, moths, and birds have been the subject of intensive nature-writing documentation for two full centuries (and a few hundred years of writing before that, too: John Evelyn's Sylva, for example, with its subsequent addition Pomona: Or, an Appendix concerning Fruit-trees in relation to CIDER, or John Philips' long georgic poem Cyder). I'm confident that they're read some of this stuff, they must have read some, but where is it in Orchard?!?

The prose of Orchard is very smooth, but the longer I spent with it, the more I wished it wasn't so smooth, so oral in its cadences. It's not a script, and I'm not blaming the presenters for being wildlife documentarians, but especially in some sections, I felt like I was listening to something on TV rather than reading something more literary.

(Warning: Nerd Alert! You'll probably want to skip these next two paragraphs, because I can hardly believe I've even written them.) Partly this has to do with sentence structure, and with the joint authors' use both of semicolons and of standalone sentence fragments. Persistently, you'll find sentences where a semicolon is used to yolk a sentence fragment to a complete sentence. I'm not flagging this out of a misguided sense of linguistic purity, but simply because it captures really well a particular rhetorical tic of knowledgeable speakers: you say what you think or mean, but you want an example or a corollary or a restatement, and instead of starting a new sentence, you tag on a second bit in apposition. Generally it's a speech form, rather than a form often seen in written English.

I'd say something similar about their sentence fragments: they can work, and they have meaning, and I like to see them used for effect. But when they're not used for deliberate effect, the resulting prose can sound a bit like an artifact of speech-to-text software.

(Okay, word-nerdish detour over.)

The book seems much loved, but the book's blurbs were intriguing. On the cover were John Burnside (twice), John Carey, Simon King, and Stephen Moss. Carey, Moss and King appear as well inside the front cover, along with Kathy Bishop as the only non-male blurber. Of the organization-level blurbers, one is the authors' sometime employer (BBC Wildlife), and another where multiple blurber John Burnside regularly writes (New Statesman). Never trust blurbs, of course, but am I wrong to notice this book's pattern?

All things considered, as I said at the beginning, Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates have written a beautiful book in Orchard: A Year in England's Eden. They've introduced readers to a singularly important concept, namely that areas around the Malverns represent a kind of hidden ancient woodland in orchard form, that has the potential through relatively straightforward changes in management to represent an enormously positive change in England's ecology. The book depends on remarkably close observation, and an excellent grounding in the science.

All of which means that my overall view will offend some of its readers, and probably every single judge for the Richard Jefferies Prize for Nature Writing.

In spite of its accessibility, its laudable mission, its close observation of nature, and its smooth, clean prose, Orchard doesn't really count for me as nature writing. It deals sensibly and intimately with natural history, sure, but unmistakably it represents a form of public translation of scientific communication. It's not nature writing as such. It can be appreciated, even beloved, but it's not nature writing in the classic form.

Am I wrong?