In 1781, Gilbert White was a country curate, living in the Hampshire village he had known all his life. Fascinated by the fauna, flora and people around him, he kept journals for many years, and was now halfway to completing his path-breaking ‘The Natural History of Selborne’. No one had written like this before, with such close observation, humour, and sympathy: his spellbinding book has remained in print, treasured by generations of readers, since 1789. Jenny Uglow illuminates this quirky, warm-hearted man, ‘the father of ecology’, by following a single year in his ‘Naturalist’s Journal’. As his diary jumps from topic to topic, she follows Gilbert White from frost to summer drought, from the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming of harvest.