After the environmentalist and writer moved to Poplar, east London, he set out to discover both the area’s natural diversity and where modern life goes wrong
In his essay The Parish and the Universe the poet Patrick Kavanagh distinguished between “parochial” and “provincial” mindsets. The provincial, he wrote, “has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis – towards which his eyes are turned – has to say on any subject.” The parochial, on the other hand, “is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish”. Kavanagh knew that attending to the local needn’t mean turning your back on the wider world. “Parochialism is universal,” he concluded, “it deals with the fundamentals.”
Nine years ago the environmentalist and writer Bob Gilbert moved to Poplar, east London, where his wife had been installed as the parish priest. Inspired by a long line of clerical naturalists – the 16th-century divine and plant hunter William Turner; John Ray, inventor of “natural theology”, whose work influenced Carl Linnaeus; above all the Rev Gilbert White, whose visionary The Natural History of Selborne was the product of a lifetime spent closely observing the plant and animal life of his parish – Gilbert set out to observe and document the nature on his doorstep. He watched sparrows and starlings fossick in his garden, plants growing on waste ground, pheasants foraging in an urban allotment. “I was a friend to the weed and the woodlouse,” he writes (tongue firmly in cheek) in Ghost Trees,“the warden of moths and slime and mosses.”
A generation of nature writers have eschewed the grand narratives of writing abroad in favour of staying closer to home
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