In 2006, the Guardian's much-loved Country Diary column is a hundred years old, & to commemorate the anniversary Martin Wainwright has compiled a collection of the best of a century's writing. Where Harry Griffin's A Lifetime of Mountains, Aurum's first & extremely successful collaboration with Guardian Books, was essentially a collection of writing about the Lake District, this new book covers the landscape of the whole of the United Kingdom, from Wales to Northern Irel&, Scotland to Norfolk. Also the Country Diary column has consistently attracted some of Britain's best writers on natural history & the countryside: Jim Perrin the mountaineering writer, whose biography of Don Whillans won the Boardman-Tasker Award, writes the dispatches from Snowdonia; Mark Cocker, author of the bestselling Birds Britannica, writes the Country Diary from Norfolk. There are also diaries written by a leading Suffragette, one of Rupert Brooke's mistresses, & even one of the Guardian's printers! And Martin Wainwright (who also edited A Lifetime of Mountains) has found diaries to reflect the changing of the countryside over a hundred years: from the prevalence of owls in First World War trenches full of vermin to the plant surveys of Second World War bombsites.