Van Gogh recommended the love of many things. In point of fact, he recommended it as the best way of getting to know God: well, I can certainly recommend it myself as the best way to get to know the wild world (or any other world, come to that).

Specialisation is a curse, generally self-inflicted: to walk through the wild places of this world concentrating on only one narrow band of life seems to me a waste of opportunities to love.

In Africa, visitors want only to see the great mammals and won’t spare a glance for the glories of the birdlife all around them. In this country, you find bird-obsessives: I remember informing a bunch of crash-hot birders that I had just seen an otter – an otter! – and found nothing but indifference. You can’t tick an otter, can you?

Their loss. These days, we are losing the naturalists, the all-rounders, the lovers of many things. I have nothing against genuine expertise, but narrowness is to be deplored, wherever you find it. We are losing, for example, the spirit of Edith Holden: yes, the person who gave us The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, which celebrated the wild year of 1906. Holden was a lover of many things all right.

I had a great lesson in the art – and the science – of loving many things when I first met Rob Macklin, an RSPB person then working at Minsmere. He was at one stage a pretty decent cricketer: I tried to snaffle him for my own team, but it couldn’t be done. All the same, I discovered that he was an all-rounder in the Ian Botham class when we walked out into the wild world.

Everything was grist to him: birds, butterflies, dragonflies. He knew all the plants. He apologised when he was unable to identify a spider. The entire world, and every one of its wild things, was an adventure: not just in naming, but in loving.

And I saw at once that this was the way to be; this was the way to see. I walked with Rob again this week. Since those Minsmere days, he has, among other things, transformed the Suffolk coastal reserve of North Warren. In winter, the place is heaving with ducks and geese, with the whistling of the wigeon and teal: in spring the air is full of marsh harriers and echoes to the sound of bitterns. Meanwhile, the nightingales sing at outrageous volume.

And with them, butterflies, and dragonflies; this year Rob had an encounter with a scarce and lovely butterfly, the Camberwell beauty, just outside his house. We walked, savouring the scant life of a quiet day: small copper butterflies, autumnal parties of longtailed tits, the arrival of curlews.

A couple of years ago, it occurred to Rob that the Edwardian lady’s centenary ought not to go unmarked. And so he marked it himself, the writing and the publishing both, and much of the photography as well: The Country Diary of a Suffolk Naturalist is a book of love.

It is not a collection of twitcher’s whoopees or an exhaustive survey: this is a simple, gorgeously coloured catalogue of delight: a leisurely traipse from season to season, celebrating arrivals, hatchings, fledgings, departures. In a simple and understated way, the book celebrates the vast complexities of the natural world. In particular, it celebrates North Warren and the glories of the Suffolk coast; but by implication, it celebrates everything else as well. It is a book of many things.

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