Nature’s Cathedral

Ideally a book will start with a hook that catches readers’ attention. Two of the most arresting opening pages in literature are Karen Blixen’s description of the view looking toward Mount Kilimanjaro from her farm in the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi in Out of Africa and Aldo Leopold’s tale of the environmental history of Wisconsin set against the background of two sawyers slowly working their way through a large oak tree in A Sand County Almanac. The beginning of Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s book is not quite in the same league, but she is an evocative writer and captured my attention by her opening sentences: “The landscape of my youth was an Irish one. The fields were filled with the brilliant chrome yellow of furze.” My youth was also Irish, and as I write in my cottage in western Connemara, I can look down over swathes of furze (which we call gorse) to the sea. A profusion of wildflowers testifies to the absence of pesticides and the clear air, scrubbed by...