Mrs. Taber taught English at Lawrence College, Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and at Columbia University, where she did postgraduate studies. She began her literary career with a play, Lady of the Moon (Penn), in 1928, and followed with a book of verse, Lyonesse (Bozart) in 1929. Taber won attention for her first humorous novel, Late Climbs the Sun (Coward, 1934). She went on to write several other novels and short story collections, including Tomorrow May Be Fair ( Coward, 1935), A Star to Steer By (Macrae, 1938) and This Is for Always (Macrae, 1938). In the late 1930s, Taber joined the staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal and began to contribute the column “Diary of Domesticity.” Her attention to quotidian details, though, is what keeps me returning to her books: "What a sense of life and comfort there is in the sight of an old farm wagon creaking on a country road, the farmer drowsing on the seat, the horses moving as if they had forever to get there. After being shut away from life for so much of the winter, it is good to see movement again" (104). A poem. A song. An ode. To be read slowly. Savor the language. Savor how the short chapters - some just a sentence long - feel like an aperture that slowly opens, takes in the view whole, then closes. Then repositions itself and repeats.

I’m disappointed because I was hoping to love this publication; henceforth I doubt I’ll be reading anymore of her books. A favorite passage appears early: He built miles of fences, yards of homemade wooden pipe, a house, barns, sheds, corrals. He put up hay with horses and got down to scythe among the willows where the mower couldn't go. He never quit from the last star to first, proving that the price of independence is slavery. (p. 11). Meadows are, as Dines puts it, “crucibles” of biodiversity. Up to 40 plant species are found in a square metre of chalk downland meadow. These plants support a tumult of other life; a typical suite of meadow plants provides food for 1,400 invertebrate species. “Pollinators such as bees are really important, but it’s the aphids, thrips, grasshoppers, bugs and beetles living on plant matter, that’s the real powerhouse of biodiversity in these areas.” Helen Baczkowska of Norfolk Wildlife Trust is another meadow maker. Working with farmers, she is restoring lost meadows by re-seeding them with hay from roadside verges, virtually the last sanctuary for wildflowers in parts of lowland Britain.

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The surviving hay meadows of the British Isles are an intrinsic part of our cultural heritage, representing a natural equivalent to our great churches, castles, and ancient standing stones. Those that remain provide a tantalising glimpse into the past to a time long before chemical fertilisers and herbicides robbed our grasslands of all their treasures; they are biodiversity hotspots, offering home and sanctuary to flora and fauna. Iain Parkinson is Head of Landscape and Horticulture at Wakehurst, Kew’s wild botanic garden in the heart of the High Weald of Sussex. He began his early career in the woodlands, but with a love for the colourful and patterned beauty of nature, it was inevitable that he would fall under the spell of the classic hay meadow. That being said, this was a magically lazy-river type of book. It takes you through the year by month starting in November when the family moved into an old homestead in Connecticut that was built in 1690. The charm and character of the place outside and in is beautifully described. Her thoughts are often poetic in nature. She tells fantastically of the nature around her. If you don’t have a garden, join local groups (or your parish council) that manage parks, playing fields, church yards or school grounds. Encourage them to create pollinator strips or allow areas of long grass in summer. Many people still see long grass as untidy, but will be won over if it is filled with flowers and framed by short grass or mown paths.

I am having a hard time writing this review, because this book is so spare, so intricate, so spellbinding that I struggle to find the words to give even a minimal conception of the scope and breadth and depth of it. Other have done a better job than I ever could. The Honest Truth: Why the decline in our meadows really must be nipped in the bud. Iain Parkinson interview in The Sunday Post.

The individuality of different meadows is their strength. On Landseer park, in the heart of urban Ipswich, wildflower-rich chalk banks created by the charity Buglife and an inspiring young conservationist, David Dowding, an Ipswich borough council ranger, are now home to scarce butterflies such as the dark green fritillary. Off the busy A19 between York and Selby is Three Hagges, a “woodmeadow” created in 2012 by Ros Forbes Adam, whose family has farmed the area for 350 years. Even Trevor Dines, Plantlife’s botanical specialist, was taken by surprise when he created his own meadow on a small field he bought near his home in north Wales in 2015. The field had been what farmers traditionally describe as “improved” – its grass fertilised and grazed so intensively that delicate wildflowers disappeared. The field had about 20 species of plant. (Many intensively farmed grass fields are now sown with just one rye-grass species.) Dines stripped off this sward to expose the soil and spread fresh hay containing local wildflower seeds from a flower-rich meadow six miles away. This “natural seeding” technique has been a key principle of the coronation meadows, of which his is one. Most meadow-makers buy wildflower seeds for the initial creation. However, Baczkowska explains, commercially produced seed is grown to be harvested on the same day, so new knapweed flowers, for instance, will flower together and go to seed in the same week. Hand-collecting local seed – as Norfolk Wildlife Trust does in partnership with Norfolk Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, a charity run by farmers – gives meadows a much longer flowering season, making them more useful to pollinators, and more beautiful. “Keeping local seed types going will give you this resilience to climate change. It’s not just the diversity of species; diversity of genetics is really important,” says Baczkowska. Stars. The only part I didn’t like was all the talk about her dogs. Which is fine, I’m just not a dog person. She certainly didn’t do it all of the time but when she did, I usually skimmed over most of that section. Lyle's family moves to the farm in the meadow less than 20 years before we moved to Boulder(1957). Lots of changes during that time. Clara's diary selections are from only 8 years before we got there.