Scenes from the Life of a Planet

This may be the first time I've ever hunted down a book based entirely on a phrase that popped into my head. I'd been thinking about the state of the natural world, and how I'd like to be able to feel that it was not only surviving in the face of everything that human beings have done and are continuing to do to it but was actually teeming with life (a feeling that's of course increasingly hard to sustain). The words "nature abounding" came into my thoughts and I wondered if they had a history. As far as I can tell, this 1941 Faber & Faber anthology of nature writing edited by E. L. Grant Watson is the only book that has ever borne the phrase as its title.

Nature Abounding represents a kind of book that has largely gone out of fashion, an armchair or bedside reader of brief prose excerpts, aimed, I suspect, at a somewhat tweedy readership. The selections chosen range from Herodotus to the 1930s, and are accompanied by rather nice illustrations by C. F. Tunnicliffe, examples of which are shown on the front cover and spine of the dust jacket. The shortest pieces are only a paragraph, the longest run to ten pages or so. There's a brief Preface but no other commentary or biographical information on the writers.

No attempt at inclusiveness was made. The writers chosen — naturalists, travelers, and literary writers — are disproportionately British and almost exclusively European (Emerson and Melville are the most notable exceptions); more eyebrow-raising is that apparently no woman writers were thought worthy of excerpting, unless there are one or two hiding under their initials ( I think not).

In spite of those limitations, it's hard to dislike the book. Nature Abounding is organized thematically by the categories of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. A garish passage from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, describing Egdon Heath, opens the book and sets the overall tone, which tends to the purple. (A bit too purple at times; I found the passages by Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas almost unreadable.) Selections on related topics flow into each other, so that, for example, there are three consecutive excerpts devoted to the hunting habits of stoats and weasels, and we get back-to-back descriptions of marine phosphorescence by Melville and Charles Darwin. Some of the writers are careful professional observers, but colorful nineteenth-century eccentrics like Charles Waterton and Frank Buckland are represented as well.

The editor, Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, was at one time a well-known cultural figure. He was born in England but spent much of his life wandering from continent to continent, writing novels, poems, books for children, and works of natural history (several of which were illustrated by Tunnicliffe). He was a bit of a heretic, mixing Darwinian ideas with Jungianism. Most or all of his books are long out of print.