Wildflower Meadows

This book is a celebration of meadows and their wildflowers. Once common-place and familiar to all, not many now remain and their typical flowers are rapidly becoming a folk memory. Stylised meadow flowers, evoking a by-gone era of rural idyll and permanent summer sunshine, are used to sell everything from tea-towels to china plates and cups. Here we reveal their true beauty with close-up photography of flower detail and more distant shots setting them in their meadow context. The 1800s are sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of Farming, but social history reveals a different story. Life was hard for the farm labourers and the picturesque cottages they lived in had leaking roofs, but nature and wildflowers thrived. The meadows and the wildflowers described in this book are survivors from this golden age: a time when there was a meadow full of wildflowers and butterflies down every lane.