Torn between Georgic and Pastoral, the British Weald is a landscape regarded as embodying ‘Englishness’, but also geographically ‘on the edge’ of the nation. Richard Jeffries revered the downs and Weald. W. H. Hudson was an evocative depicter of a romanticised version and guidebooks including E.V. Lucas’s The Highways and Byways of Sussex (1904) and Arthur Beckett’s The Spirit of the Downs (1909) coaxed city-dwellers to countryside that was not ‘too country’. The Georgic-Pastoral was treated parodically by Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (1932) offering a subversive deflation of rural narratives. Despite this, the continuing appeal of landscape narratives is evident in the success of James Rebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life (2015). Drawing on Hudson’s similarly titled book, he locates shepherding within a history of landscape suggesting that images of ‘Englishness’, encapsulated in familiar livestock and gently turning seasonal rhythms, serve a purpose in imagining a national identity poised between Georgic and Pastoral.

Nature writing has been parodied for what Richard Kerridge identifies as ‘purple prose’. Given the remarkable resurgence of the popularity of nature writing in the first decades of this century, this chapter considers how nature writers now can develop a prose style that avoids the excesses traditionally associated with the genre and that will face up to and not shrink from the threats to nature, including ‘global warming and the huge loss of wildlife populations’, that demand perspectival shifts between the local and the global, the personal and the planetary.