CREDITON’S award-winning bookshop, The Bookery, is welcoming “The One Show” presenter Mike Dilger this month to talk about his new book, “One Thousand Shades of Green – A Year in Search of Britain’s Wild Plants”.

An insightful assessment of the nation’s flora, it follows his quest to find 1,000 plant species during the course of a year.

For most of 2020, Mike Dilger’s normal day-job of travelling to the four corners of the British Isles to film wildlife for the “The One Show” all but disappeared, limiting his daily wildlife fixes to those short walks to and from home with son and dog.

With his wings clipped, he couldn’t shake the feeling he was missing out and even felt he was suffering from some form of “nature deficit disorder”.

But as spring slowly turned to summer, the simple pleasure of getting to know the wild plants on his own local patch turned his daily exercise from being somewhat tedious to utterly enthralling.

Realising how little he knew about the wild plants just beyond his doorstep became the catalyst for reigniting a long-buried botanical passion.

Mike Dilger is one of wildlife TV’s best-known presenters, in his role as resident wildlife reporter on “BBC One’s” primetime current affairs show, “The One Show”, since 2007.

As well as being an experienced TV presenter, Mike has travelled widely in South America and Southeast Asia on ecological expeditions, sometimes in front of the camera, sometimes behind.

To book tickets for the event, which is at 7pm on Wednesday, February 22 at The Bookery, call into the shop at 21 High Street, Crediton, EX17 3AH, phone 01363 774740, or visit https://thebookery.org.uk/events/.

Tickets are £6 (redeemable against a copy of the book).