WHEN a hawker dragonfly swerves from patrolling a woodland ride to hover pugnaciously before your face, it examines you with more than 50,000 facets of its compound eyes, each contributing to build up a complex, comprehensive image. Likewise, the 197 vignettes of 350 words drawn together in this collection offer a multifaceted vista of the British landscape over the past six years.

The articles, gathered from The Guardian’s Country Diary column, are arranged by month, and immerse us in the rich, but imperilled, diversity of a pastoral year. Covid, both restricting for some and releasing for others’ engagement with their surroundings, twists as a grey thread throughout, but it is only one strand among many, making quiet connections between the observer and the observed.

The poet Ian McMillan, in his affectionate introduction, sees these diary entries as still points at the heart of the news, and reminders of how headlines and stories filling front pages have consequences that shiver through each ecosystem, micro-habitat, moorland, back garden, and estuary. Will nightingales return to a West Sussex woodland? Has an elusive butterfly finally disappeared from a Dartmoor valley? Will commercial cynicism deny access to and then deplete a Shropshire meadow?

Some correspondents are deeply embedded in their parish, sensitive to subtle changes in its rhythm and shape; others explore widely, alive to new encounters and fresh experiences, slipping from the transient iridescence of a Chalk Hill Blue Butterfly’s pastel-powder wings to the panorama of a Cornish waterway navigated by a flotilla of whistling steamboats.

Throughout the collection, there is profound respect for the minutiae and the magnitude of the natural world, a combination of observation and reflection compressed by the discipline of a 350-word limit into colourful, compact, and bejewelled meditations on the immensity, intensity, and fragility of creation.

Among lamentations for the depredation that human activity forces upon our environments, there is hope: at the centre of the book, 50 species of flora and fauna are discovered in a single square metre of a Norfolk garden, reminding us to see more clearly and, in seeing, to take decisive, affirmative action to facilitate future encounters with hawking dragonflies.

The Revd Richard Greatrex is Rector of the Chew Valley East Benefice, in Somerset.

Under the Changing Skies: The best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024
Paul Fleckney, editor
Clifford Harper, illustrator
Guardian Faber Publishing £20
(978-1-78335-310-1)
Church Times Bookshop £18