The author Ronald Blythe met painter Mary Newcomb late in his long life. Together, they produced Talking to the Neighbours: Conversations in a Country Parish (2003), with his words, her paintings and a title that sums up so much of his life, especially his friendship with John and Christine Nash.

There are no Raindrops on the Branches where the Birds are Sitting

Mary Newcomb died in 2008 but Ronnie (as he always wanted to be called), who was born in 1922, lived on until 2023, two months beyond his 100th birthday. Their book contains seasonal reflections on country life and its rhythm within the church calendar. His friend Ian Collins arranged for him to be honoured as a lay canon at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds in 2004 which was supposed to release Ronnie, now in his mid-80s, from arduous duties across three local parish churches. Ronnie simply took on the new task, too, as well as writing a weekly column for the Church Times, writing more books and making even more friendships.

Blythe is best known for his lyrical but stark history of a semi-fictional Suffolk village, Akenfield, published in 1969. Using the words and memories of its working inhabitants, the book sold over 300,000 copies and was made into a film.

When publishers sought dust jacket images they often made odd choices, even using the steep hill in Sherborne, Dorset, famous from a Hovis television advert, to evoke a typical long-lost rural world. Suffolk is a county painted by a remarkable number of great artists and the publishers could have looked closer to home. Ronnie always did.

But in 1999, when the book was issued as a Penguin Classic, exactly the right cover was found: a painting of two carefully observed jays with Stoke-by-Nayland church in the distance, by Sir Cedric Morris. This was painted in 1940, just a few years before Ronnie met Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines at their extraordinary art school at Benton End, near Hadleigh in Suffolk. His first visit was in June, at 'iris time' when Morris's glorious garden was at its finest.

As a child at school in Sudbury, Ronnie wanted to be a painter and was entranced by the idea that two of England's greatest landscape painters, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable, had been born only 15 miles apart and so near his own home: Gainsborough was born in Sudbury and Constable in East Bergholt.

Gainsborough and Constable loved their native Suffolk landscape throughout their lives, as did Ronnie. He was not parochial in the negative sense and, to recover from ill health after his brief service during the Second World War, he visited Cornwall and its coast, returning there for holidays with friends most years. It seems inevitable in his happily well-connected life that, on his first visit, Ronnie should happen to fall into a casual conversation outside a gallery with one of the St Ives' painters, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, and begin to correspond with her.

Ronnie had great charm, and his world was one where artists, writers and musicians, came together to create and sometimes seek privacy. As he explained in 2011, 'I was a poet but I longed to be a painter like the rest of them. What I basically am is a listener and a watcher. I absorb, without asking questions, but I don't forget things, and I was inspired by a lot of these people because they worked so hard and didn't make a fuss. They just lived their lives in a very independent and disciplined way.'

His administrative jobs allowed him to write in his own time and, whilst working for the Aldeburgh Festival at Snape Maltings, he met memorable contemporaries, not only the festival's creators, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, but also E. M. Forster and Edith Sitwell.

His first job at Colchester Public Library had introduced him to the most important person in his life. Christine Nash, née Kühlenthal, came to borrow a musical score in 1951, and invited Ronnie to tea as Morris and Lett-Haines were mutual friends. The friendship that Ronnie developed with Christine and with her husband the painter John Nash was life-changing.

1920, vintage snapshot print by unknown photographer

John and Christine married just before the First World War ended and she gave up her career as a painter to create the conditions in which her husband might flourish. She had worked in Roger Fry's Omega Workshop in Bloomsbury as an assistant, making 'a green, & yellow & black & white & khaki check dress for Nina Hamnett'.

Through Christine, a bit of Bloomsbury continued to flourish on the banks of the Stour. Two beautiful paintings from Christine's student days always hung in their house and were bequeathed to Tate in Ronnie's will.

Christine and John Nash lived in an impractical corner of paradise, an Elizabethan house with the splendid name of Bottengoms in the equally well-named village of Wormingford, just over the Essex border. Ronnie became part of their lives, caring for the house when they were away and finally moved in to nurse John after Christine's death in 1976. They had bequeathed the house to him, and he lived there for the rest of his life, calling his weekly columns 'Word from Wormingford'.

Having nursed John till his death and watched Christine grow frail, Ronnie wrote The View in Winter in 2005, recording individual perceptions of old age, a late echo of the creative oral history of Akenfield.

After the deaths of his 'dear ones' (a term he inherited from the Nashs, who surrounded themselves – as he always did, too – with practical and loving friends), Ronnie found letters hidden in a bread oven that enabled him to write an illustrated account – First Friends (1999) – of the early relationships between John Nash, his famous brother Paul Nash, Dora Carrington and Christine Kühlenthal, who met at the Slade School of Art before the First World War.

Ronnie wrote extensively about those he loved and admired but was never content with simply writing – he was always active in celebrating. As President of the John Clare Society, he made his journeys to the nature poet's house in Northamptonshire by public transport, turning them into pilgrimages. He never drove, long resisted a typewriter or modern plumbing, taking time to observe and record his world.

George Herbert, another poet-priest, was one of his heroes whose walks from his small church at Bemerton through the water meadows to Salisbury Cathedral feature in Ronnie's book Divine Landscapes (1986). This describes the influence of landscape on imagination and spiritual belief, a cornerstone of Ronnie's own life.

In a fascinating new biography of Ronald Blythe, irresistibly entitled Blythe Spirit, Ian Collins, a close friend of Ronnie to the end, tells of a mysterious encounter when Ronnie visits The National Gallery to see the famous Mr and Mrs Andrews by Gainsborough just after its purchase in 1960. He is formally greeted, much to his surprise, by a gallery warder, mistaken perhaps for a descendant of the portrait's Robert Andrews, a resident of Suffolk. Even though Ronnie was dressed for a trip to town, carrying a briefcase, he was recognised as part of the Suffolk landscape, just like Mr Andrews.

Gill Hedley, writer and curator

Blythe Spirit by Ian Collins is available from John Murray Press