It might be a lot more than just dandelions – daisies, clover and other wildflowers may also spring up when they get the chance. India forms an important segment of what is known as the Oriental, or Sino-Indian, biogeographic region, which extends eastward from India to include mainland and much of insular Southeast Asia.

Flora Britannica - Penguin Books UK

He is more tender towards humanity than, say, James Lovelock, who has always said that the planet will go on without us if we continue to abuse it. Previously, more people might have been inclined towards TS Eliot’s thing in The Waste Land: ‘April is the cruellest month…’” He suggests that the resurgence of the natural world can cause, in anyone with the slightest depressive inclinations, feelings of resentment: “I want to go back to being curled up in a chair in winter, not to have to confront the vivacity of the world. It is unique in that it is not a botanical flora but a cultural one - an account of the role of wild plants in social life, arts, custom and landscape. In those areas, such xerophytic (drought-tolerant) trees as species of acacia (babul and catechu) and Butea monosperma predominate. Its follow-up, The Unofficial Countryside (1973), was inspired by his time working as an editor at Penguin: behind its West Drayton offices he found derelict canals and Victorian rubbish tips teeming with life.Mabey became involved with the anti-nuclear movement through the Committee of 100, formed in 1960 by Bertrand Russell. As a child, his relationship with the land around the family home in Berkhamsted was close, physical, “aboriginal”. Because viruses were there before the very first single-celled creatures; the very first signs of life on the planet, so they’re our ancestors. Marvell derives terrific energy from the act of looking, in the knowledge he will never truly be one with his surroundings. It is unique in that it is not a botanical flora but a cultural one – an account of the role of wild plants in social life, arts, custom and landscape.

Flora Britannica - the definative new guide to wild flowers

Examples include giant walkingsticks that can attain 8 inches (20 cm) in length, leaf insects (walking leaves), huge atlas beetles, elegant luna moths, and beautiful birdwing and swallowtail butterflies. The Dandelion is a flower with wildlife super-powers, providing abundant nectar and pollen, and seeds stems, roots and leaves giving food to a wide range of pollinators, moths, butterflies, birds and even people. Conspicuous features of the tropical landscape are the palms, which are represented in India by some 100 species.And lots of them live with us quite amicably, because it’s not in a virus’s interest to kill its host. In 2003, in a piece for the Guardian, he challenged the intrusive special effects of modern wildlife filming and criticised Attenborough for not addressing the environmental crisis in his shows. He spent the first half of his life amongst the Chiltern beechwoods, and now lives in Norfolk in a house surrounded by ash trees. Fields are “so abused by over-ploughing, they look like those pictures of the trenches Paul Nash painted, just enormous billows of dead clay”. Projects likely to cause ecological damage must be cleared by the national government’s Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change.

The man who saw everything - New Statesman

Among the common, majestic-looking trees found throughout much of India are the mango—a major source of fruit—and two revered Ficus species, the pipal (famous as the Bo tree of the Buddha) and the banyan. A cross the garden, Polly is putting out lunch, with three brightly coloured blankets for the knees. In biology, flora refers to the plants found in specific regions, such as flora in North America, or of a geologic period. Sal is confined to the lower Himalayas, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Assam, and Madhya Pradesh.I can understand it now, because he’d been cut down in his late forties by his own bad habits and by coronary disease, and I think he was just resentful of any of us children doing better than him.