Orchids are the most beguiling plants in our flora. Some use sexual deception to lure pollinators, others forge underground partnerships with fungi and many have a tantalising tendency to appear in profusion in one year and vanish the next. By his own admission, Jon Dunn has fallen under their spell, with a bad case of orchid fever. It’s a compulsion that led him to leave his home in Shetland and spend a summer seeking every species in Britain, from the early purples of spring to the last of the autumn lady’s tresses. For the newly curious, this is a useful, colourful and gentle introduction to some of the issues, accompanied by some unusual and tempting recipes that can slot easily into everyday cooking, while more knowledgeable readers will still find sustenance in preparing Hunter’s delicious dishes. The book offers an antidote to modern life’s digital distractions and endless rolling news cycle, which so often leave us running on empty.

Landreth dives deep into the murky misogyny of swimming history, from the Victorian segregation of male and female bathers, to the ludicrous early swimming gear – women were expected to swim in voluminous dresses, shoes and corsets at a time when men swam naked. It is hard to believe now, but women were even arrested for swimming in public, and the first serious women swimmers were chaperoned at all times when competing. He finds silence – or nature’s return – in places that once thronged with drovers, miners or crofters, and tells poignant tales of long-lost lives. A navvies’ graveyard near the remote dam they built; illegal stills hidden in the wilds; abandoned mines on the Slate Isles; caves that hid Jacobin fugitives, now known only through rumour. Though Baker weaves the known history around his present adventures, each of his journeys fills with atmosphere and emotion. Every photograph has been beautifully reproduced in this large format, with detailed technical information appearing alongside the photographer’s personal note on composition and subject. We’re introduced to entities that are intricate, surprising, sophisticated, adaptable, mystifying, virtually omnipresent and extraordinarily enduring (they’ve been around for over a billion years).Part one tells the stories of the England Coast Path heroes – those who have worked tirelessly to realise what, at times, must have felt like an impossible ambition. He goes on to outline his ‘best of’ coastal experiences: everything from swimming, snorkelling, camping and canoeing to foraging and fossil hunting. Part two divides the coast into 23 sections, with enticing suggestions for exploration: hug an oak, follow fulmars on thermals, catch crabs, visit a stone circle or watch seals. Cottongrass Summer won’t collect the headlines that a book by a celebrity natural history TV presenter might achieve, but I can’t think of a more important book that’s been written about British wildlife in the past 20 years. Then there are the animals: the sheep are gone; the cows have been joined by a rented bull called Break-Heart Maestro;. the pigs are making piglets; and the goats have turned out to be psychopaths. With a down-to-earth style, Dilger’s self-deprecating sense of humour and more than a healthy dose of enthusiasm, it’s an immediately accessible book, one I can see being enjoyed by a wide range of people from botanists and plant enthusiasts to armchair explorers. He selects eight birds, from celebrated songsters such as nightingales and skylarks to species less renowned, such as shearwaters, and uses their songs as a way to explore their loves and lives. And for some, such as the nightingale, this works brilliantly, even though it’s hard to be sure exactly what a “sputnik-beep” is.

There are legendary contemporary characters too, such as Freda Streeter, the chain-smoking Dover matriarch who has coached hundreds of successful Channel swimmers – among them Dr Julie Bradshaw MBE, who swam butterfly to France (as if it wasn’t hard enough already).Match the softest, quietest plumage with rapier-sharp talons and hearing, and you have a killer combination, literally. Owls also – more than any other birds – resemble people, thanks to their upright posture, flat faces and penetrating gaze that meets ours. Miriam Darlington delights in exploring such owly adaptations in the follow-up to her highly acclaimed debut Otter Country. Jenny Landreth is a swimmer, of that there is little doubt. Her vivid descriptions of the meditative peace found in a good swim shine with the liquid intensity of sunlight reflected on rippling water. English exceptionalism is an ugly hangover of Empire, when many of the walls that keep us out were built. But the exceptional quality of England revealed here is the iniquity of land distribution and access, and the ease with which many of us seem to accept this fragmentation of our history and our nature. We do not have to look very far before we see far more enlightened attitudes to access. We all have our preconceptions about Yorkshire, its landscape, people and history. Our thoughts will be a mix of straight-talking characters, dales, moors and rivers, heavy industry, classic seaside resorts, Emmerdale villages and gritstone towns. There’s plenty of crunching bones and death, both natural – among predator and prey – and inflicted by human traps, spades and guns. But this bleak realism is balanced by gorgeous nature writing, teeming with earthy scents and sounds, and beautiful descriptions of Dartmoor’s wilderness through the seasons.

In 2012, the wild plant conservation charity Plantlife published Our Vanishing Flora, highlighting the loss of wildflowers from across Great Britain since 1953. The report showed that a staggering 97% of wildflower meadows have been lost since the 1930s, prompting Plantlife’s patron HRH The Prince of Wales to call for the urgent creation of new ones. The Coronation Meadows initiative was launched in 2013, with the aim of creating at least one new meadow in every county, using local, native seed from those small fragments of meadows and grasslands that still survive. In places, The Lost Spells is explicit about threats to the natural world, and here too is ‘Heartwood’, Macfarlane’s protest poem against the pointless felling of street trees. As the prologue says: “Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear.”After reaching the semi-finals of MasterChef and gaining accolades for his pub’s sustainable sourcing, chef Ollie Hunter’s contribution to the sustainable diet debate is full of promise. Jim Holden’s lush photography captures the vibrancy of these heavenly places, mixing down-among-the-stalks close-ups with sweeping vistas, and ranging from the wet meadows of the Thames floodplain north to the machair of Hebridean coasts. But he never forgets these are working environments – haymaking is the reason they exist – so there are as many pictures of farming techniques and ‘meadow folk’. Beachcombing turns out to be a balm for body and mind, a restorative ritual that takes Huband around the Shetland archipelago and to Orkney, Fair Isle, the Faroes and Netherlands. She meets fellow beach-scourers, surveys the rich marine wildlife and falls in love with ‘sea post’, the ancient custom of casting messages adrift in bottles. Travelling with him is pure delight. Dunn is a fine nature writer, whose descriptions of locations are eloquent and often poignant, as so many orchid habitats are at risk. He is an erudite authority on orchid identification, while his digressions into their uses as aphrodisiacs, their promiscuous tendency to form hybrids that bamboozle botanists, and tales of their curious place in human affairs are constantly entertaining. Who knew that a helleborine chemical compound that stupefies pollinating wasps was administered to Hitler by his physician? This is a heartwarming, inspirational book that shows why, if we want a wilder future, we will all have to fight for it.