M ichael Allaby (1933–2025) edited Span magazine for the Soil Association through the late 1960s and was associate editor of The Ecologist in the early 1970s, before turning freelance in 1973 and producing, over the following half-century, more than a hundred books on ecology, weather, climate and the wider environmental sciences. His Oxford dictionaries — Ecology, Zoology, Plant Sciences, Earth Sciences — became standard single-volume references in their fields.
In the early 1980s he collaborated with the atmospheric scientist James Lovelock on The Great Extinction and The Greening of Mars, two books that helped move speculative science writing into the mainstream. His later Dangerous Weather series found a younger audience, and his DK Guide to Weather won the Aventis Junior Prize for Science Books in 2001.
For Filbert Press he wrote Plant Love, a sustained, faintly scandalised account of how flowering plants actually go about reproducing — written in the conversational, plain-spoken voice that had been his signature for fifty years.
