Sally is an experienced author, having written many books for education practitioners and teachers. She has retired from her previous job as education trainer and adviser in the UK and abroad, and now concentrates on writing about her lifelong interest in the countryside.
Her two major recent titles are:
’Flora’, which describes the flower-filled fields that surrounded the hilltop house in West Yorkshire where she and her partner Phill lived. The book contains ‘portraits’ of one hundred wild flowers that grow in these fields, their Latin and country names, their uses in cooking and medicine, and their unique histories and properties. The book is lavishly illustrated with Sally’s own photos, all taken on site in the meadows.
‘Grass’ is a companion volume, following the process of growing and harvesting hay in the natural hay meadows where Sally lived for ten years. Following the seasons, the book traces the growth of that fascinating, but often overlooked living green blanket the covers much of our countryside. Alongside the text and excerpts from her diaries, Grass is illustrated with colour photos on every page, as the book leads you up into the Pennine hills above Happy Valley, where natural hay meadows lie quietly producing sweet hay among those hundreds of wild flowers.
When Flora was published, Sally was asked to provide a field guide, which readers of Grass could use on walks and outings on the footpaths, ancient tracks and packhorse ways of Yorkshire. The Flora Field Guide, and a subsequently extended collection, Country Flowers, have now been published.
During the recent pandemic, Sally wrote a diary, illustrated with photographs and her own drawings. This diary included accounts of walks in the Derbyshire countryside, where she now lives. Embarking on these expeditions was a calculated risk, as she and Phill abandoned the local parks in Sheffield, where panting runners and careless cyclists provided daily risks of Covid infection. Instead they chose to explore country footpaths where they met no-one and were able to enjoy the ‘green and the blue’ of the natural world. The diary, in two volumes is wryly titled ‘The Lockdown Diaries of two Harmless Criminals’.
During the coming year, Sally will be working on another diary, this time following an epic driving holiday she and Phill undertook in nearly thirty years ago, when they drove from Leicester to the southern end of the Greek Peloponnese. She will also continue her interest in drawing, working to improve her drawing techniques in pencil, pastel and watercolour.
