A Buzz in the Meadow:The Natural History of a French Farmby Dave GoulsonPicador, 2015A Buzz in the Meadow, Dave Goulson's follow-up to last year's winningly heartfelt A Sting in the Tale, continues this author's mild-mannered mission to strike fear into the hearts of melissophobics everywhere, for among the many “secret lives” Goulson wishes to lay bare in his accounts of his small meadow-farm tucked away in a rural corner of France are the byzantine ways and means of his beloved bees. As in the previous book, he promises to take his readers on a journey into the small lives of countryside living things: “You will learn how a death-watch beetle finds its mate; about the importance of flies; how some flowers act as thermal blankets for bees; and about the complex politics of life as a paper wasp, among much else. In the telling of these stories, perhaps I can also convey to you the fun of discovery...”He succeeds entirely in this, largely by allowing his country home, dubbed Chez Nauche, to remain partially wild:

In many modern British houses, house-proud home-owners are horrified if they see a single woodlouse on the carpet, or an ant in the kitchen. This attitude must swiftly be abandoned at Chez Nauche, or a nervous breakdown would inevitably ensue. The house has slowly settled into its environment over the decades, and is swamped and overrun with plants and animals …

Voles, owls, bees, birds, and bugs of all kinds are presented with greater relish and complexity than all but a small handful of authors can manage so charismatically as this. Goulson's prose is a trifle too studied to convey the ease of a natural raconteur, but his stories are unfailingly entertaining just the same, and in A Buzz in the Meadow (more so than in its predecessor), these stories gradually shade into deeper concerns, especially the need for the conservation necessary to ensure that all the planet's million wild places just like Chez Nauche can continue to exist at all:

As species become extinct, so the mysteries of their lives are lost for ever. We are destroying our children's inheritance, stealing from them the joy of discovery and exploration of the natural world. What is more, we are undermining the ability of our planet to support us; although we understand very little about the myriad complex interactions between the many creatures on this Earth, we do have good evidence to suggest that these interactions are vital to the health of the planet, and hence are vital for our own well-being and perhaps for our very survival.

The environmental clarion-call is welcome, and it lends unexpected heft to Goulson's story. That story will appeal to gardening and nature aficionados, and to anybody who's rediscovered this Spring the simple joys of being outside in the sunlight under a broad blue sky. You won't catch bee-leery folk relaxing quite so easily out in the territory of their enemy, but even those watchful folk can enjoy A Buzz in the Meadow in the comfort of their favorite (indoor) reading chair.