The Rarity Garden - Customer Reviews - Maddie Brown - 16 June 2025

Mon 16th Jun, 2025

The Rarity Garden… an absolute literary masterpiece. I don’t claim to be an avid reader; I’d win medals in starting books but not finishing them. But…The Rarity Garden was different. The perfectly crafted embossed cover, the thick pages, the beautiful photographs and drawings. This wasn’t your average book, this was a book made to stand the test of time. To be passed from generation to generation. The opening sentence got me hooked and I could instantly see Richard’s personality and sense of humour.

I’ve known Richard for a few years now, our first encounter being when he took me under his wing, as a dorky geography student. I always had a passion for nature but had never really focused my attention on birds. Richard’s enthusiasm and sheer love for them captivated me, and I became “wildly obsessed”. As I read through The Rarity Garden I felt the same way, in awe of his experiences, knowledge and pure love for these birds. 

Since our first meeting, when I get asked what I want to do with my career. My response tends to be “I want to BE Richard Baines”. Nothing else… no context… And to me this book really shows why that is my answer. Every single bird is described just as enthusiastically and in as much detail as the others, but this is what makes this book stand out from others in this niche. 

You can feel Richard’s passion as he describes not only what bird he has seen, but its migration journey, the changes in weather fronts that has made them arrive at that certain time of the year, the destination of the bird and where they had started their journey. This is the difference between a bird book written to inform people about birds and a bird book written to influence and educate a generation of birders on protecting these amazing species on a more personal level. 

The drive towards creating and managing these special habitats that he so vividly described is powerful. It makes me want to go into my back garden and dig a big hole to create a pond for waterfowl and waders. 

The readability of the book was seamless, 10 years of observing, note taking and studying in 240 pages, yet it felt as though we were reading a year flash by season by season. 

This book is a piece of Richard’s utterly amazing birding mind. A mind that is full of knowledge learnt from experiencing the greats of the bird world and studying them to their core. This book is a staple for the bookshelf, one that I personally will be going back to time and time again. 

As a young birder, I would encourage everyone to buy this book, educate yourselves to a deeper level and protect our environment so my generation and future generations can continue to see the likes of turtle doves, white tailed sea eagles and greenfinches.

Maybe to fulfil my dream of “being Richard Baines” a move to a coastguard cottage on the Great White Cape will be written into my destiny…

Maddie Brown