Gilbert White stained glass, Selborne: The beautiful tribute to a pioneering naturalist

Gilbert White's home church contains a fascinating memorial to the writer.

Gilbert White Memorial Stained Glass Window at St.Mary's Church, Selborne.
Gilbert White Memorial Stained Glass Window at St.Mary's Church, Selborne.
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

One can only admire the man who, at a time when fellow researchers preferred to dissect cold specimens, discovered the distinction between the chiffchaff, willow warbler and wood warbler through rapt attention to birdsong — Revd Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne (1789) remains influential.

Its author is remembered in the Church of St Mary, where he was curate, by two glorious stained-glass windows. One, dating from 1920, shows St Francis preaching to birds, all of which are mentioned in White’s writings.

St Francis preaching to the birds, a memorial window in Selborne Church to commemorate the bicentenary of Gilbert White's birth.

The other, installed in 1993 (and shown at the top of the page), is scattered with flora and fauna; look closely to spot his pet tortoise.

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(Image credit: Alamy)

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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.