IN HIS DELICIOUS BOOK of essays The Heart of England (Faber Finds, £13/offer £11.70) the poet Edward Thomas inadvertently put his finger on the two main options for summer reading. “I have found only two satisfying places in the world in August,” he remarks. “The Bodleian library and a little reedy willowy pond, where you may enjoy the month perfectly, sitting and being friendly with moorhen and kingfisher and snake.” Books as escape, in short, or as lure into the real world.

From the Times Archive: The 1977 review of the work of Edward Thomas

Considering the lilies of the field (whose summer lounging had biblical approval) can be indulged in either way. Flora Poetica, edited by Sarah Maguire (Chatto & Windus, £11.99/£10.79) explores the poetic celebration of plants in English, from an anonymous 14th-century lyric about the magical allure of roses to James Reiss's overtly sexy tribute to a lily itself: “brought her inside to study her fuzzy brown anthers”.

Geoffrey Grigson's 1958 classic The Englishman's Flora (available second-hand from abebooks.co.uk) also includes poetry too, but chiefly documents, species by species, how wild flowers have entered our culture, been plucked apart in children's games, symbolised spring, and been eaten by the adventurous. Grigson's prose is exact and evocative.

During her spell as a columnist with The Times Katherine Swift demonstrated that she is, by a considerable margin, our best garden writer. The Morville Hours (Bloomsbury, £17.99/£16.19) is notionally an account of her own garden in a Shropshire dower house structured like a medieval Book of Hours. The “hours” glow like illuminated manuscripts: fog-bound winter days “when whole trees are drowned fathoms deep in arctic air”; Hale-Bopp's comet over the summer compass plants.

But as a 17th-century writer remarked, the garden is “a ground plot for the mind”, and the enchantment of Swift's meditations lies also in the way that she uses her plot as a map for exploring her own and her landscape's past.

The final volume of Ronald Blythe's Wormingford Trilogy: Borderland (Canterbury Press, £10.99/£9.89) - (Buy the book from Books First £16.99 includes free delivery) is a celebration of home, of “dwelling” in modern parlance. Living in the painter John Nash's former house in Constable's Stour Valley, Blythe is rooted in an iconic English landscape, but his exquisite accounts of gardening, walking, remembering, watching, are never sentimental. Like John Clare, Blythe has made a universal art out of the local and the particular. “Travellers,” he comments, “are apt to delight in what we would not have them see.”

From the Times Archive: The 1964 review of 'Portrait of an English Village', also by Ronald Blythe

Gretel Ehrlich is best known as the documenter - and prophet - of the world's icy wastes. But her first book of prose, The Solace of Open Spaces (Penguin USA, $14/£7.59) is a rhapsody to a marginally more congenial habitat - the vast wind-raked plains of North West America. Her accounts of the tenderness of cowboys, of being struck by lightning, of soaring eagles and the witherings of drought (“the roots of trees would rise to the surface and flail through the dust in search of water”) have an electrifying vividness not often found this side of the Atlantic. “Wyoming has found its Whitman”, concluded Annie Dillard.

Dillard's own essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (HarperPerennial, £12.99/£11.69) is similarly a look at the natural world through a prism of heart-stopping clarity and strangeness. The stone in question is a friend's “wishing-stone” kept under a sheet of leather “like a canary in its cage”. Follow her expedition from this to a hallucinatory account of the 1979 total eclipse. It will haunt you for ever.

From the Times Archive: The 1984 announcement of 'Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters'

A Venetian Bestiary by Jan Morris (Faber, 12.99/£11.69) is a glittering miniature, a literary cabinet of curiosities. With a microscopist's skill Morris has taken a section across Venetian life to expose the city's intimate engagement with animal life, real and mythic. Her cameos of Carpaccio's dogs, the Winged Lion of St Mark, and the truth behind fritto misto reveal a city that still has a strong streak of medieval animism.

From the Times Archive: The 1982 review of 'A Venetian Bestiary'

Two recent animal stories could have come straight out of a bestiary. Red-Tails in Love , by the Wall Street Journal columnist Marie Winn (Bloomsbury, £7.99/£7.59), is the beguiling tale of the domestic struggles of a pair of these hawks that nested on a Fifth Avenue roof, just opposite Woody Allen's apartment.

The natural history of the “Hawk Bench” - where an eccentric band of New York bohos kept vigil over them - is every bit as hilarious and touching. A few blocks away, the New York Times staffman Verlyn Klinkenborg was, so to speak, taking the Bodleian option. His Timothy's Book: Notes of an English Country Tortoise (Portobello, £9.99/£9.49) is a brilliant and audacious book, an imagining of 18th-century life and Enlightenment double-standards, from the point of view of the naturalist Gilbert White's hapless tortoise, Timothy. The voice Klinkenborg invents for Timothy - stark, outraged, devoid of human hypocrisy - strips your skin away.

With a second series of Lark Rise to Candleford scheduled for BBC One, take the opportunity to bury yourself in Flora Thompson's 1945 original (Penguin, £8.99/£8.54), set, not as the television version is, in the plush hills of Avon, but in spare, flat Oxfordshire. In this unpromising setting Thompson's fellow villagers created a life of warmth and ingenuity that the author recreated (Annie Dillard once said that writing is “imagination meeting memory in the dark”) 50 years later. Her exact, wry book of yearning is, as a result, both library and pond.

From the Times Archive: The 1983 review of 'Lark Rise to Candleford'

Richard Mabey is an author and naturalist. Country Matters is a compilation of his many countryside writings.

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