Born in 1720, White was educated at the University of Oxford, UK, before settling at The Wakes — his family home in Selborne, UK — in around 1757. Then, from 1768, he worked for 25 years on his Naturalist’s Journal, a columnar diary in which each page covered a week of observations on fruit and vegetable experiments, local creatures and weather conditions. White’s daily entries in Selborne were often haiku-like in their simplicity. He described “vast rocklike, distant clouds” or simply stated “Bees swarm much. Sheep are shorn.”
Uglow’s book examines one year of journal entries, from 1781. She chose this year for two reasons: it was the mid-point in White’s writing of his book, and a year after Timothy the tortoise arrived, a pet inherited by White that was later found to be female. Timothy often featured in the journal entries, being suspected of amorous longings whenever it wandered off.
Born in 1720, White was educated at the University of Oxford, UK, before settling at The Wakes — his family home in Selborne, UK — in around 1757. Then, from 1768, he worked for 25 years on his Naturalist’s Journal, a columnar diary in which each page covered a week of observations on fruit and vegetable experiments, local creatures and weather conditions. White’s daily entries in Selborne were often haiku-like in their simplicity. He described “vast rocklike, distant clouds” or simply stated “Bees swarm much. Sheep are shorn.”