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Enid Blyton's Nature Lover's Book
First published in 1944, this delightful collection of stories, poems, and nature facts is centered on three children and their uncle who takes them on nature walks, unveiling the delights of the countryside throughout the seasons. Poems by Enid Blyton as well as classic works by Wordsworth, Keats, and others are accompanied by lush illustrations of various animals and plants. A field guide to common birds and plants is also provided, making this a must-have for nature lovers young and old.
255 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2008
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222 people want to read
About the author
Enid Blyton
5,214 books6,355 followersSee also:
Ένιντ Μπλάιτον (Greek)
Enida Blaitona (Latvian)
Энид Блайтон (Russian)
Inid Blajton (Serbian)
Інід Блайтон (Ukrainian)
Enid Mary Blyton (1897–1968) was an English author of children's books.
Born in South London, Blyton was the eldest of three children, and showed an early interest in music and reading. She was educated at St. Christopher's School, Beckenham, and - having decided not to pursue her music - at Ipswich High School, where she trained as a kindergarten teacher. She taught for five years before her 1924 marriage to editor Hugh Pollock, with whom she had two daughters. This marriage ended in divorce, and Blyton remarried in 1943, to surgeon Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters. She died in 1968, one year after her second husband.
Blyton was a prolific author of children's books, who penned an estimated 800 books over about 40 years. Her stories were often either children's adventure and mystery stories, or fantasies involving magic. Notable series include: The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers, Noddy, The Wishing Chair, Mallory Towers, and St. Clare's.
According to the Index Translationum, Blyton was the fifth most popular author in the world in 2007, coming after Lenin but ahead of Shakespeare.
See also her pen name Mary Pollock
Ένιντ Μπλάιτον (Greek)
Enida Blaitona (Latvian)
Энид Блайтон (Russian)
Inid Blajton (Serbian)
Інід Блайтон (Ukrainian)
Enid Mary Blyton (1897–1968) was an English author of children's books.
Born in South London, Blyton was the eldest of three children, and showed an early interest in music and reading. She was educated at St. Christopher's School, Beckenham, and - having decided not to pursue her music - at Ipswich High School, where she trained as a kindergarten teacher. She taught for five years before her 1924 marriage to editor Hugh Pollock, with whom she had two daughters. This marriage ended in divorce, and Blyton remarried in 1943, to surgeon Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters. She died in 1968, one year after her second husband.
Blyton was a prolific author of children's books, who penned an estimated 800 books over about 40 years. Her stories were often either children's adventure and mystery stories, or fantasies involving magic. Notable series include: The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers, Noddy, The Wishing Chair, Mallory Towers, and St. Clare's.
According to the Index Translationum, Blyton was the fifth most popular author in the world in 2007, coming after Lenin but ahead of Shakespeare.
See also her pen name Mary Pollock
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 28, 2018
This outstanding limited book it has 16 colour Plates by Noel Hopking of nature , the cover is outstanding & the B/W ill by Enid Blyton also done brilliantly.
This has rare stories, poetry, history facts of birds & animals this smashing book
This has rare stories, poetry, history facts of birds & animals this smashing book
March 9, 2015
As ever with me and Enid Blyton, the idea of 'rating' one of her books is something quite different than rating another. So four stars, yes, definitely, but they are four Blyton-shaped stars and thus of a very different ilk to those that I would give something else.
This book is odd. So odd. Delightful, too, and vividly poignant at others with its depiction of an English countryside that does not exist any more, but it is that oddness that sticks with me. I never quite had Enid Blyton down as the person who would teach me about the hibernation habits of snails, but she has and now I know, so I must recast my opinion of this woman of a thousand authorial faces. And I think, perhaps, that this will always be my difficulty with Blyton. I cant, quite, find her somehow. I can figure out what makes a text Blytonesque through comparing that text with another, I can figure out what her characters like by comparing them with one another, but I can very rarely put my finger on Blyton herself. Even her intensely surreal autobiography doesn't really reveal who she is. There is such artifice about how she holds herself in her work that sometimes, I think, the artifice reveals more than it may have been intended to reveal.
Consider the title. Even there, with it being "Enid Blyton's Nature Lover's book", it's throwing out this idea of a herd of nature lovers who belong to Enid Blyton. That this author has transcended her space in literature so much that her name itself can act as a sort of literary imperialism? That's fascinating. Unnerving, too, but also deeply and wildly fascinating.
And so to the book itself. It's split into a series of chapters which firstly cover two walks a month taken by a group of children and their next door neighbour. Following this we have some 'poems of the open air', some 'interesting things to do' and then a list of slightly accusatory 'do you know these flowers / birds / poems / trees?' followed by a group of stories about various other nature related things. It is a beast of a book, really, that covers a lot of ground.
The chapters dealing with the walks are perhaps the most interesting despite their eventual repetition. The book opens in January and in the house of John, Janet and Pat. The three children are bored until the next door neighbour - Mr Meredith, soon to be known as Uncle Merry - offers to take them out for a walk. This, naturally, is the best thing ever and Changes Their Lives For The Better. Each month, the children and Uncle Merry go out for two walks and discover everything going in the countryside. It's mildly hysterical at points - they pretty much take five steps and discover 200 species of plant, 20001 trees and a spider that nobody's ever seen before. Everything is sporting and lovely and blows everybody's minds and that's pretty much it for a hundred or so pages.
What is striking, however, is that when you read this sequentially (and I suspect it wasn't intended to be - there's something about that structure that doesn't sing out for a linear read), you can pick up on some tense character development and a distinct tension between Uncle Merry and Janet. John, her brother, is sporting and has a good eye for spotting things. Pat is pretty much the comic relief. Janet, though, she starts by saying how much she hates wildlife - to which: "How silly of you!" said Mr Meredith.
There's bracing, and then there's bracing. In June, Janet is scared of a bat: "Janet, I shall slap you!" said Uncle Merry impatiently. "A bat can't hurt you! I shall send you home if you behave like this!". In June, later, she gets told off: "How Janet loves to squeal!" (Her squeal, at this point, is due to Pat saying that there's a snake near her - fairly squeal worthy, I feel). In July, she is complimented for not squealing or jumping when bats and moths fly around her in the dark. Whilst this isn't the most precise analysis I've ever done and there's a natural proviso about acknowledging the cultural context this was being written in, there's something there for me in this journey of Janet's; this blanket 'stop being a bit rubbish' attitude which is quite aggressively framed towards her. At one point, Janet even supposes at one point that her nervousness is just "a habit she's got into". It's not a habit that any of the boys have gotten into. (FREE JANET).
So - complex gendering of characters and random physical violence aside, this book does remain oddly appealing. (And if that's not a sentence I could write about a ton of Enid Blyton, I don't know what is). It's a book full of vivid little inked drawings of everything the children find and every now and then, there are some full colour plates which are heavenly. Rich and very much of the period, and sort of quite lovely with it. The endpapers too are gorgeous; reen and white illustrations of the walks. The children are in suitable sensible gea, everyone is smiling and skipping and they're surrounded by squirrels and hares and rabbits and birds - it's a sort of pastoral scene ramped up to factor twelve.
TL:DR-> Bonkers, problematic, but lovely. As ever.
This book is odd. So odd. Delightful, too, and vividly poignant at others with its depiction of an English countryside that does not exist any more, but it is that oddness that sticks with me. I never quite had Enid Blyton down as the person who would teach me about the hibernation habits of snails, but she has and now I know, so I must recast my opinion of this woman of a thousand authorial faces. And I think, perhaps, that this will always be my difficulty with Blyton. I cant, quite, find her somehow. I can figure out what makes a text Blytonesque through comparing that text with another, I can figure out what her characters like by comparing them with one another, but I can very rarely put my finger on Blyton herself. Even her intensely surreal autobiography doesn't really reveal who she is. There is such artifice about how she holds herself in her work that sometimes, I think, the artifice reveals more than it may have been intended to reveal.
Consider the title. Even there, with it being "Enid Blyton's Nature Lover's book", it's throwing out this idea of a herd of nature lovers who belong to Enid Blyton. That this author has transcended her space in literature so much that her name itself can act as a sort of literary imperialism? That's fascinating. Unnerving, too, but also deeply and wildly fascinating.
And so to the book itself. It's split into a series of chapters which firstly cover two walks a month taken by a group of children and their next door neighbour. Following this we have some 'poems of the open air', some 'interesting things to do' and then a list of slightly accusatory 'do you know these flowers / birds / poems / trees?' followed by a group of stories about various other nature related things. It is a beast of a book, really, that covers a lot of ground.
The chapters dealing with the walks are perhaps the most interesting despite their eventual repetition. The book opens in January and in the house of John, Janet and Pat. The three children are bored until the next door neighbour - Mr Meredith, soon to be known as Uncle Merry - offers to take them out for a walk. This, naturally, is the best thing ever and Changes Their Lives For The Better. Each month, the children and Uncle Merry go out for two walks and discover everything going in the countryside. It's mildly hysterical at points - they pretty much take five steps and discover 200 species of plant, 20001 trees and a spider that nobody's ever seen before. Everything is sporting and lovely and blows everybody's minds and that's pretty much it for a hundred or so pages.
What is striking, however, is that when you read this sequentially (and I suspect it wasn't intended to be - there's something about that structure that doesn't sing out for a linear read), you can pick up on some tense character development and a distinct tension between Uncle Merry and Janet. John, her brother, is sporting and has a good eye for spotting things. Pat is pretty much the comic relief. Janet, though, she starts by saying how much she hates wildlife - to which: "How silly of you!" said Mr Meredith.
There's bracing, and then there's bracing. In June, Janet is scared of a bat: "Janet, I shall slap you!" said Uncle Merry impatiently. "A bat can't hurt you! I shall send you home if you behave like this!". In June, later, she gets told off: "How Janet loves to squeal!" (Her squeal, at this point, is due to Pat saying that there's a snake near her - fairly squeal worthy, I feel). In July, she is complimented for not squealing or jumping when bats and moths fly around her in the dark. Whilst this isn't the most precise analysis I've ever done and there's a natural proviso about acknowledging the cultural context this was being written in, there's something there for me in this journey of Janet's; this blanket 'stop being a bit rubbish' attitude which is quite aggressively framed towards her. At one point, Janet even supposes at one point that her nervousness is just "a habit she's got into". It's not a habit that any of the boys have gotten into. (FREE JANET).
So - complex gendering of characters and random physical violence aside, this book does remain oddly appealing. (And if that's not a sentence I could write about a ton of Enid Blyton, I don't know what is). It's a book full of vivid little inked drawings of everything the children find and every now and then, there are some full colour plates which are heavenly. Rich and very much of the period, and sort of quite lovely with it. The endpapers too are gorgeous; reen and white illustrations of the walks. The children are in suitable sensible gea, everyone is smiling and skipping and they're surrounded by squirrels and hares and rabbits and birds - it's a sort of pastoral scene ramped up to factor twelve.
TL:DR-> Bonkers, problematic, but lovely. As ever.
January 3, 2019
https://lovethevillain.wordpress.com/...
Now, this my childhood in a nutshell. Enid Blyton was the author that ignited my love for reading. I loved all her books when I was a child. I would sit in the house for hours, forgoing friendships and childhood play, digesting the stories that sang with fairies, pixies, magic and lucky children who got to enjoy it all.
This book was a little different than the usual ones I read. This book didn't have any magic or fairies in it. Instead, Blyton introduced me to how wonderful and surprising the countryside could be. I learned new trees and flowers without ever having to lift my eyes from the page. I learnt that bugs could be interesting and beautiful, instead of scary and gross. I learned that nature is the real magic in our world, and this book taught me to love it!
To think of the things we never noticed! We hardly ever saw anything last year—what dull children we were!
Then, when I was a little older, I put the book away in a safe place and, as often happens with childhood books, it must have got thrown out. I never saw it again, and couldn't for the life of me remember what it had been called. I thought this treasure was lost to me forever.
But then, randomly I found it again! It was on a used book site and I ordered it immediately, knowing how much I would love it all over again!
The story follows three children who go on bi-monthly walks with their neighbour who they affectionately call Uncle Merry. Each month the kids are shown new flowers, trees, insects, bird and other animals, and encouraged to 'use their eyes' and spot all the wonderful changes that occur in nature every month.
The writing is very dated, with the children have a gay old time and Uncle Merry threatening mild child abuse when the young girl squeals over some animal near her and he exclaims, "Janet, I will slap you!"
Still, it was a different time back then. This is incredibly apparent in the way that nature has changed so much over such a short period on time. The book was originally written in 1944, and already some of the plants and animals described in the English countryside are virtually non-existent. It's a pretty melancholy book when you read it against what can be seen nowadays.
There are two things I can teach you if you like to come out for walks with me—one is to use your eyes and ears in the countryside, and the other is to learn a few things about what you see and hear, so that you may really know and love the things of the woods and hills, the ponds and fields.
After the main story are some fun little activities that would cause children these days to roll their eyes and proclaim you 'so uncool' for even mentioning them. A few pages of flowers, birds and trees to look out for. Some poems, and then a couple of super short stories to finish off the book. All in all, it's a treasure of yesteryear and I loved it.
Now, this my childhood in a nutshell. Enid Blyton was the author that ignited my love for reading. I loved all her books when I was a child. I would sit in the house for hours, forgoing friendships and childhood play, digesting the stories that sang with fairies, pixies, magic and lucky children who got to enjoy it all.
This book was a little different than the usual ones I read. This book didn't have any magic or fairies in it. Instead, Blyton introduced me to how wonderful and surprising the countryside could be. I learned new trees and flowers without ever having to lift my eyes from the page. I learnt that bugs could be interesting and beautiful, instead of scary and gross. I learned that nature is the real magic in our world, and this book taught me to love it!
To think of the things we never noticed! We hardly ever saw anything last year—what dull children we were!
Then, when I was a little older, I put the book away in a safe place and, as often happens with childhood books, it must have got thrown out. I never saw it again, and couldn't for the life of me remember what it had been called. I thought this treasure was lost to me forever.
But then, randomly I found it again! It was on a used book site and I ordered it immediately, knowing how much I would love it all over again!
The story follows three children who go on bi-monthly walks with their neighbour who they affectionately call Uncle Merry. Each month the kids are shown new flowers, trees, insects, bird and other animals, and encouraged to 'use their eyes' and spot all the wonderful changes that occur in nature every month.
The writing is very dated, with the children have a gay old time and Uncle Merry threatening mild child abuse when the young girl squeals over some animal near her and he exclaims, "Janet, I will slap you!"
Still, it was a different time back then. This is incredibly apparent in the way that nature has changed so much over such a short period on time. The book was originally written in 1944, and already some of the plants and animals described in the English countryside are virtually non-existent. It's a pretty melancholy book when you read it against what can be seen nowadays.
There are two things I can teach you if you like to come out for walks with me—one is to use your eyes and ears in the countryside, and the other is to learn a few things about what you see and hear, so that you may really know and love the things of the woods and hills, the ponds and fields.
After the main story are some fun little activities that would cause children these days to roll their eyes and proclaim you 'so uncool' for even mentioning them. A few pages of flowers, birds and trees to look out for. Some poems, and then a couple of super short stories to finish off the book. All in all, it's a treasure of yesteryear and I loved it.
November 26, 2021
3.5🌟 Enid Blyton’d book is really beautiful. The artwork is gorgeous and the black & white illustrations are so charming. The author’s own poetry truly made me smile and the tree and flower guides in the back of the book are invaluable. I’m sure I will revisit these pages often during the seasons of the year.
But...
I had to take a full star away from this book for the way “Uncle” Merry spoke to and treated Janet. Not only did he speak to her in a condescending way, but he belittled her fear and even threatened to hit her at one point. I almost stopped reading the book when I reached that section.
From that moment on, I had a dislike for this character, even though he was very knowledgeable and taught the children much during the year. I just could not forget how he spoke to her and responded to her, clearly a sensitive child (as I was also a sensitive child growing up).
This might not bother most people and I do know that the book is dated but, to me, his character ruined the book for me. Once I made it past December, there were many fun sections on crafts and nature, which I enjoyed. I would only recommend this book for its art and field guide at the end of the book.
But...
I had to take a full star away from this book for the way “Uncle” Merry spoke to and treated Janet. Not only did he speak to her in a condescending way, but he belittled her fear and even threatened to hit her at one point. I almost stopped reading the book when I reached that section.
From that moment on, I had a dislike for this character, even though he was very knowledgeable and taught the children much during the year. I just could not forget how he spoke to her and responded to her, clearly a sensitive child (as I was also a sensitive child growing up).
This might not bother most people and I do know that the book is dated but, to me, his character ruined the book for me. Once I made it past December, there were many fun sections on crafts and nature, which I enjoyed. I would only recommend this book for its art and field guide at the end of the book.
June 8, 2024
First published in 1944, Enid Blyton's Nature Lover's Book is somewhat dated in regards to the interactions between the three siblings in the story and their neighbor who offers to take them on nature walks throughout the seasons of the year. However, the amount of nature lore and facts packed into the book make it easy to overlook these sometimes annoying exchanges. There is a lot of information on various birds, flowers and trees as well as fun crafts to make with objects readily available outdoors. There are also directions for making charts of birds, flowers, leaves, animals, butterflies and so on to ensure the reader learns to recognize them while walking through the park or woods. What a great family project this could be!
August 22, 2024
This book was one of the delights of my childhood. It is still excellent, though a little dated and stands for the simple pleasures of the outdoors as an option to being a couch potato. Parents might like to note this! The one sadness is that so many 'common' birds are no longer plentiful and you won't have any difficulty in distinguishing between a blackbird and a thrush by its song since it is 90% more likely to be the blackbird.I last saw a thrush in my garden during the recent snow when it was driven in by hunger but the familiar 'tap-tap' of a snail on the pavement is more or less a thing of the past.
Nostalgia rules!
Nostalgia rules!
August 21, 2023
Awesome and beautiful
January 20, 2009
As well as being a prolific writer of mysteries, boarding school adventures and fantasy fiction for young people, Enid Blyton was a keen naturalist. Inspired by her frequent rambles through the English countryside with her father, this collection of stories, poems and illustrated guides to common flora and fauna will delight her fans. Originally published in 1944, it is at times poignant to read about species that are now far less common than they once were such as the elm and the endangered water vole. It is like taking a virtual stroll with Enid through Anne, George, Dick and Julian's England.
March 20, 2009
Perfectly charming; sweetly written, lovely illustrations. If only there was one also for the US! Why doesn't anyone write such things anymore?
August 13, 2016
Lovely book for young and also older readers about nature and observing what is around us throughout the year.
December 20, 2015
Perfectly written. Very nicely explained. I can feel the feeling the book wants to illustrate.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews