On BBC television’s 'Springwatch' Kate Humble and Chris Packham were briefly discussing their favourite natural history books. Neither of them made mention of Frederick Warne’s Wayside and Woodland series. Had I been on camera with them I would have made an emphatic case for this set of titles which became, effectively, the first field guides to natural history to be published in Britain.

Introduced in the late 1800s with Wayside and Woodland Blossoms, the series remained in production for the best part of the following century. The value of the series is not so much that the books were written by respected authorities but more that those authorities wrote with a love of and a delight in their subjects. Gradually, and especially throughout the 1960s and ’70s, this approach to nature publishing went into decline and books became less lyrical and more scientific. (A tendency emphasised by the simultaneous replacement of the term ‘nature study’ by ‘natural history’). There is an analogy in education. I have written elsewhere, that when I was at primary school we did nature study but at the grammar school it became biology which was nothing more than chemistry with dead frogs.

Many of today’s natural history books, being un-lyrical and full of facts have a tendency to remove humanity from nature, to turn it into a discipline rather than a love. Not the least of the many reasons for this is that facts, once discovered, are much easier to write than lyrical prose. I do not deny that today’s books are often beautifully produced, if generally over-designed, but because of these production standards they run the same risk as the television documentary: the book and the telly are actually perceived as being better than the real thing. The result can often be that when you go out into the countryside you find it disappointingly sterile, the more so because most of us are unlearned in its characteristics, its perfumes and symbols. We would be less removed if we all had been brought up with the Wayside and Woodland books.

I would not suggest that there is no place for the scientific natural history book and nor would I suggest that the more lyrical form is extinct. Some publishers manage to combine the two genres with apparent ease and some of their titles are infinitely enjoyable. Basil and Annette Harley’s series, now published by Apollo Books, must be the leading exception and of course scientific study will benefit the survival of many species unfortunate enough to live in a world which one animal is doing its best to destroy.

None of the current books, however, manages to combine scholarship and lyricism as the Wayside and Woodland series did. Edward Step (Blossoms) and T.A. Coward (Birds) were not John Clare or even Gilbert White. But they did write as people centrally involved with their subjects, centrally involved in the field (rather than in the research laboratory or merely behind the camera, which is itself a barrier), and not as voyeurs. But above all they wrote with an enthusiastic love of nature. And that is another way of saying a love of life.