Environmental History

Robin Fedden takes us on a visit to snowy Alpine passes where, for three quarters of a century, at the end of the Dark Ages, Saracen forces dominated the chief land routes between Italy and France.

Long a beautiful feature of the English landscape, William Seymour explains how forests have played an important part in the economic history of Great Britain.

Elka Schrijver recounts how tornados frequently changed the course of history for the province and town of Utrecht.

Anthony Dent examines the lives of English foresters, parkers, warreners, and the preservation of deer and boar for hunting, all in the era of the Bard.

Steven R. Smith finds that John Evelyn proposed some drastic remedies to combat the polluted air of London in the seventeenth century.

The Oxford Dodo has defined our idea of the creature. When alive, the bird was displayed in London as part of a kind of urban freak show. In death it featured in Alice in Wonderland. Charles Norton reveals what became of the last dodo.

A new exhibition at the British Museum on the aftermath of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79 raises questions about the relationship between past and present, says Daisy Dunn.

The diffusion of wild flowers, thousands of miles from their native places, is a “vegetable record” Geoffrey Grigson suggests, of human migration and colonization.

Wilfrid Blunt explains the history of British flora's natives and invasives

Certain mysteries of pre-Saxon Britain are decoded by Jacquetta Hawkes