Working with the Nature Conservancy and its successors, George Peterken started the ancient woodland inventory, and helped negotiate the nature conservation aspects of the Government's 1985 Broadleaves Policy, which he later worked to implement in his role as nature conservation adviser at the Forestry Commission. His research interests, which have centred on nature conservation, natural woodland and long-term and large-scale aspects of woodland ecology, benefited from a Bullard Fellowship at Harvard University. George's early books included Woodland Conservation and Management (1981) and Natural Woodland (1996), before he changed direction to write Wye Valley (2008) in the New Naturalist series and Meadows (2013) for the British Wildlife Collection. More recently, he has returned to woodlands to co-write Woodland Development: a long-term study of Lady Park Wood (2017) and Art meets Ecology (2020). Born into a New Forest family, he now lives in the Lower Wye Valley. He was awarded an OBE for services to forestry in 1994.

A book everyone interested in our countryside and its wildlife will want to own

Foreword
1 Introducing meadows
2 The meadow flora
3 Classification and the variety of meadows
4 Origins
5 Making hay the traditional way
6 The geography of traditional meadows
7 Improving meadows
8 Diversity
9 Change in the meadows
[...]opean meadows
11 Translocating meadows to the colonies
12 Birds, bees, butterflies and other fauna
13 Meadows in the mind
14 Loss and survival
15 Looking forward