Root Causes and The Seeds of a Cure

After "Flora Britannica" was published in 1996, Mabey found that, for the first time in his life, he had finished a book without ideas for others ready to fill the creative void. He was, he says, "exhausted, played out" and he started to question the value of his work.

Moping developed into clinical depression, and he began receiving therapy, of which he later wrote: "The idea that discussing or simply understanding an illness will in some way make the hard-wiring that caused it disappear is, as most people who have been through it acknowledge, wishful thinking." He tried repeatedly "to exorcise my depression" by immersing himself in the countryside "but all I felt was a kind of rebuke."

So he went to bed and closed the curtains, stirring only to drag himself to the pub to drown his sorrows. He let the phone ring and the mail pile up, a tactic that brought debt collectors to the door. In this fetal state, he formed "an escapist fantasy" of fleeing to the wilderness, living by his foraging skills. "It was a ludicrous dream," he writes, "and mostly I just lay there, curled up in the 'crash position' they demonstrate to you on aircraft, scared stiff and praying hopelessly that the turbulence would pass."

On three occasions he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital, St. Andrew's in Northampton. This turned out to be the same institution where one of his literary heroes, the 19th-century nature poet John Clare, had been committed for the last 23 years of his life, after a diagnosis of lunacy caused by "years addicted to poetical prosing."

"I've left my own old home of homes," Clare wrote in a poem called "The Flitting," and Mabey recognized that feeling of displacement. After his third hospitalization, Mabey's doctors would only discharge him into the care of friends. Thus he found himself living in a series of homes in Norfolk, a county marked by shingle beaches, intensive agriculture, low flat terrain and Dutch-style windmills. His sister decided to sell the family home that had been his refuge -- and, later, his dungeon -- and he found himself adrift in the world.

But as that door closed, another opened. Mabey fell in love with an old acquaintance, Polly Munro. And as she left to go on a previously planned vacation, she made a request that proved to be pivotal: She asked Mabey to keep a journal that she could read when she got back.

He did. He wrote about the garden, and the birds, and the wooded preserve he had created at his old family home, but he also wrote about events he attended and his political views and his days as an undergraduate in Oxford. "The more I wrote," he tells readers, "the less my life seemed to resemble that of the marginalised voyeur I'd cast myself as."

By the time his sweetheart returned, "I realised I'd written what was virtually a short book, and that I had my life back again."

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Over lunch in the village pub, Mabey says "Nature Cure" is a story of passage, from one physical place to another, from one emotional state to another.

The Chiltern Hills of his childhood are revered in England as a place of particular beauty, a hilly upland of hedgerows and meadows and woods and quaint villages. His move to the flat, wet landscape of Norfolk put him in the middle of an entirely different environment that Mabey observes keenly. He gives us wild horses and cranes and a marshland plant named hornwort, which actually fizzes with oxygen on hot days, singing like "Aeolian harps."

"I was having to learn to live in two ways which had not been available to me before, with a degree of independence that I hadn't had before and also -- and this is where the nature bit comes in -- the experience of getting ill and getting better," he says. "It changed my perception of what writing was about."

In the United Kingdom, "Nature Cure" was shortlisted for the prestigious Whitbread Prize, sold well and has been reissued in paperback. In the United States -- where memoirs of personal crisis may be more commonplace -- it has gone largely unnoticed, though it is still in print. "To say it sank like a stone," says Mabey, laughing, "would assume it was above the surface to start with."

Back in the garden of the home in Norfolk he and Munro have shared for the past five years, he points out a wildflower he has encouraged to grow amid the grass. Hayrattle, it's called, and because it's semi-parasitic it stunts the grass and prevents it from taking over. Mabey's new life and new work, including a sequel to "Nature Cure," are his hayrattle, keeping the demons away.

He said he is "ever vigilant" against the melancholy returning. "I think it unlikely because I have an infrastructure in my life I didn't have before. But I'm a moody person, I probably have as many bleak days as the next person, so I'm not complacent."