Julia Donaldson is not, from the look of it, a woman easily shocked.

The doughty mouse in The Gruffalo might have been modelled on her, so full of sang froid as he is. Yet she displayed real dismay when she revealed that on her many visits to primary schools, whenever she shows the class a pine cone or a hazel nut, "nine times out of ten not a single child will know what they are". Worse, some of their teachers are equally bemused.

Promoting a scheme with the Woodland Trust and Yorkshire Tea that aims to plant 500,000 trees in the UK in the next five years, Donaldson said that, "in my experience there just isn't a lot of talk about nature or practical study in schools any more. Children don't have the freedom to explore their surroundings either." Blaming the restrictive curriculum and a surfeit of paperwork for teachers' neglect of the subject, she also recognises that children are not able to explore the countryside or wilder places as they once did.

Her comments come on the heels of growing outrage that a few years ago, The Oxford Junior Dictionary quietly dropped words such as acorn and buttercup and blackberry in favour of broadband and blog and others from the digital sphere. Lisa Saunders, from Northern Ireland, was first to notice the lexicographical abyss opening beneath our feet. In 2008, as the New Yorker describes it, "while helping her son with homework, she realized that 'moss' and 'fern' had gone AWOL. Smelling a rat-but not a 'ferret,' which had been stricken-she went on to compare entries across six editions of the dictionary dating to 1978. Saunders was 'completely horrified,' she told the Telegraph, to discover that, in addition to flora and fauna, religious terms such as 'saint,' 'chapel,' 'psalm,' and 'vicar' had been excommunicated."

Leaving aside the persecution of Christian words, a subject deserving of a column itself, you can't help fearing that the natural world is being airbrushed out of existence. And, as the rewriters of history know only too well, remove a word from the lexicon and overnight the concept - or persona non grata - also starts to fade.

It is surely no coincidence that the fast-growing gulf between us and the countryside coincides with the rise of what is called the new nature writing. Nor that for the most part this nature writing is urban and philosophical in origin, representing more the apprehension of advancing distance and loss than nature writing as understood 50 years ago.

I am less concerned about writing for adults, though, than for children, because to grow up with no awareness of the country, and not to have experienced what being set loose in it feels like, is to be starved. You could call it a modern form of poverty, that of the soul and imagination. Thinking back to my own Dunbar childhood, it differed from John Muir's in having cars and bikes to get us deep into the hills faster than on foot, but would have been completely recognisable to him in most other respects. It feels antediluvian to recall how many hours my friends and I spent crawling around rockpools and scrambling up trees and along riverbanks and meadows, all on our own. I met a school chum recently for the first time in decades, and instantly we were transported back to the days when we would go into fields to cheer up cows or sheep or horses we thought in need of company.

The remorseless creep of houses and cars across open country imperils all of us. If young readers are not introduced to the joys - the word is not exaggerated - of nature, then in time there will be too few to champion and protect the wilds. Librarians, teachers, parents and publishers should campaign to bring wildlife into children's lives, even if only through books. As one hopes they will one day be inspired to learn for themselves, the outdoors is far more thrilling than stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia, because the magic of it is real.