Published by Vintage, 2005, 228 pages.

“My past, or lack of it, had caught up with me. I’d been bogged down in the same place for too long, trapped by habits and memories. I was clotted with rootedness. And in the end I’d fallen ill and run out of words. My Irish grandfather, a day-worker who rarely stayed in one house long enough to pay the rent, knew what to do at times like this. In that word that catches all the shades of escape, from the young bird’s flutter from the nest to the dodging of someone in trouble, he’d flit.”

Richard Mabey had spent his entire life in the same house on the edge of the Chiltern Hills, surrounded by woods. The woods had been a comfort to him, something he could rely on to raise his spirits. But after the death of his mother, he went into a severe depression, made worse by a feeling of being disconnected from nature, which left him unmoored.

“I can’t any longer duck the questions which have been so unsettling me for the past few months—and in a more general form, I suppose, for much of my life. Where do I belong? What’s my role? How, in social, emotional, ecological terms, do I find a way of fitting?”

Mabey and his sister sell their family home, and Mabey moves to a friend’s house in East Anglia, thinking that what he needed was a change of scenery. East Anglia’s landscape is unlike Chiltern Hills: mostly flat wetlands instead of woods, it is also the site of intensive agriculture, something Mabey deplores. Initially nervous about how he was going to cope, he slowly settles in to his new home and begins to heal. This book is the story of that process.

The place Mabey moves to is a room in a farmhouse in Norfolk. The terms he and his landlady Kate agree on are: “No permanence. No serious baggage, either physical or emotional.” On weekdays, when Kate is in London, Mabey is to take care of her three cats and keep an eye on the house. He has just left the home he had lived in all his life: he does not feel ready to move permanently, instead, looking for “something handy, make-do, maybe a touch cloistered”. His room in the farmhouse is a kind of lair, perfect for a writer.

As he recovers from his breakdown—which he writes about—he starts to explore his new surroundings. He is helped by Polly, the woman who later becomes his partner and to whom the book is dedicated.

Although this is a book about the healing power of nature, it is also much more. Mabey is an admirer of the poet John Clare, whose poems celebrate the British countryside. We learn a lot about Clare: his life and how he suffered from depression and spent his last years in an asylum—his depression and love of nature being things that Mabey identifies with. In fact, Mabey spent two weeks in the same asylum, now St. Andrews Hospital.

Mabey covers a wide range of subjects: cave drawings, flint, moats, nature programmes (he’s not a fan), and the war in Iraq. He writes lyrically about nature. Setting out to explore the Broads on a misty day, the sun being barely visible, “no more than a hint of lightening in the south-east, and the mist had the kind of opalescence a trace of chalk gives to water. The scene in front of me—cracked willow pollards, meadows glassy with standing water, motionless and amorphous cattle—seemed to be settling out, condensing from the mist.”

Mabey feels strongly about the way we are destroying the landscape and losing our connection with it: through agribusinesses and intense development. He points out that in the commons system in England as well as in peasant societies worldwide, “rootedness and neighbourliness made self-regulation second nature”, unlike the exploitation of the land by large companies.

One of the most important points he makes is about our place in the natural world: not as users or stewards, but as one of the many species who are part of the web of life, who are dependent on the well-being of the rest of nature to survive.

“I can’t do without wild creatures, and suspect that our species can’t either. To lose contact with our origins, with the wellsprings of life, with patterns of evolution and wisdom that are not controlled by us, with other ways of being against which to measure ourselves…would have consequences we could scarcely bring ourselves to predict. … [O]ur relationship with wild creatures should be through imagination and respect, not through exploitation and manipulation and management…”

Nature Cure is a thoughtful book with many layers: it is a memoir, a love story, a book about nature, and a reminder of the importance of taking care of our world and of those with whom we share it.