We must stop treating soil like dirt
From our UK edition
There is a delightful moment at the end of this book when Frank Ashwood is out looking for soil-dwelling invertebrates in his adopted New Zealand home. Suddenly he proclaims: ‘I notice something and my heart skips a beat. A velvet worm.’ He goes on to tell us that the discovery of two of these rare organisms in one day is ‘a thing of dreams’. Far from scoffing at his excitement, the reader has long come to share his enthusiasm for the extraordinariness of velvet worms. They are, after all, lozenges of blue and orange stripes rolled in tiny sequins. That we have also come to see the full beauty, abundance and sheer weirdness of the whole subsoil realm is a measure of Ashwood’s wider achievement.
