IT HAS BEEN A BUMPER YEAR if you like to get wild. Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Ray Mears: the greatest living pignut-chomping Englishmen have new books out, and so do wild women such as Thomasina Miers and Jay Griffiths.

Macfarlane's The Wild Places (Granta, £18.99/offer £17.09) is a visionary work of natural history that describes encounters with wilderness in the Mountains of the Mind author's poetic style. More than just a travelogue of Britain's least-touched places, it explores what wildness means and why we need it.

Brother Nature by Jim Crumley (Whittles Publishing, £16.99/£15.29) is an equally impressive evocation of one man's lifelong relationship with landscape. Crumley has been writing about his corner of Highland Perthshire for 30 years, and this beautiful study of flora and fauna is as bracing and enchanting as a country walk.

Jay Griffiths's project is similar, but scarier. Her memoir is a rough ride around the wildest places and people, and into her own troubled psyche. “Chthonian” is not the only c-word you'll find in the critically acclaimed Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hamish Hamilton, £20/£18).

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But there is only one person I'd like to be stuck up the Limpopo with, and that's Ray Mears. His long-awaited Wild Food (Hodder, £20/£18) is the product of a lifetime's research and exploration, and is ably co-written by his television sidekick Gordon Hillman.

Not since Roger Phillips's seminal book of the same name (just reprinted by Macmillan, incidentally) has anyone thrown open the fridge door of nature with such enthusiasm, generosity and respect.

The Wild Gourmets: Adventures in Food and Freedom (Bloomsbury, £20/£18) is Ray-lite, but still an eminently present-worthy account by Guy Grieve and Thomasina Miers of their mission to traverse the country living off the land.

We all know how easy it is to rustle up a pigeon and beetroot salad after putting a tent up in the rain, but there are lots of clever camping tips and lovely pictures.

Sights are set higher in The Wild Trees: What if the Last Wilderness is Above Our Heads? (Allen Lane, £20/£18). Richard Preston looks up at — and down from— the planet's super-sized trees and meets people risking their lives to protect them.

The godfather of these latter-day wildophiles was Henry D. Thoreau, and Yale University Press has created a handsomely produced selection from his journal. I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer (£25/£22.50), will delight discerning escape-fantasists everywhere.

Finally, two essential new wilderness manuals do exactly what they say on the tin — How to Poo in the Arctic (BBC, £14.99/£13.49) by Marshall Corwin (with foreword by Bruce Parry) and Sex in a Tent: A Wild Couple's Guide to Getting Naughty in Nature by Michelle Waitzman (Wilderness Press, £7.99/£7.59).

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