Michael David Jones

Former palaeontologist, lifelong naturalist and mountaineer, Michael David Jones has occupied half a century with exploration of remote parts of the world in search of rare plants and elusive wildlife. Trans-Saharan journeys to the Atakor Mountains, camel-treks with Laikipia-Masai warriors into the Ndoto Mountains of the Kenyan Northern Territories, and exploration of the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand are some of the more exotic adventures; winter ascents of High Atlas summits in search of Aoudad and the scouring of arctic tundra for Snowy Owl, the more extreme. Nearer to home, arctic-alpine plants and Mediterranean orchids have been a passionate interest, leading to numerous visits to the mountains of Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.

It is this wealth of knowledge and experience allied to an interest in the history of landscape which informs his writing. In the words of a reviewer of The Tymphaean Symphony “ The writing is dense, shunning the meretricious and the superficial, but will appeal to anybody with, or desiring to gain, a deep love of natural history.” If there is aspiration in his work it is akin to that of Richard Jefferies, the 19th century naturalist whose intimate knowledge and meticulous observations of his native Wiltshire, inspired the great spiritual strength he derived from communion with the natural world and from contact with elemental things. This writing is similarly motivated and expressed, in stark contrast with the self-indulgence which characterises much of contemporary so-called “new nature writing”.