David Attenborough once surprised me by saying that he could easily have lived without travelling all over the world to look at the world’s most spectacular flora and fauna. He would simply have done what various chums of his did and found one small corner of the planet where he could “look at a smaller panorama in greater depth”.
This delightful book is a convincing argument that Attenborough is right: even a small plot of land is full of wild wonders if you know how to look for them.
A decade ago, Dave Goulson, the professor of biology at Sussex University, bought Chez Nauche, a derelict farmhouse with a meadow in southwest France , where he set out to create a wildlife sanctuary. “Conservation is