Book picks similar to
What Is a Garden? by W.S. Merwin


gardening
nature
botany-garden-nature
contemporary

Grading Curve


Emily Bunney - 2021
    The only thing missing is a new relationship. Her best friend decides she needs to jump feet first into the dating pool and sets her up a profile on Curve Connection - a dating app for men seeking curvy women. At first she's sceptical and some of the messages she receives don’t help. But then she matches with NerdGuy - a sweet sensitive younger man who just gets her. Could this be the new relationship she's been looking for?TateStarting a tech company with his twin brother was always Tate’s dream, but when times got tough, they took a job refitting the tech in a small Elementary school. He arrives expecting to meet a middle aged, matronly principal. However, the woman who crashes into him is a curvy, sexy, sassy pain in his ass. As they begin to work together, she fights him at every turn, but he just loves butting heads with her. Tate knows starting a relationship with Principal Jess Vega is not an option, not while they work together. So instead he turns to Curve Connection to see if he can match with another curvy woman to try and take his mind off Jess's peachy round ass.Can these two find love online or will it land unexpectantly on their doorstep?Searching for your soulmate? Welcome to Curve Connection, a brand-new dating app developed by curvy women for curvy women and the men who love them. Whether you're into executives, sports stars, blue collar workers, rockstars, or billionaires, we deliver guaranteed happily-ever-afters. Swipe left or right to start searching for your soulmate today.Curvy Soulmates is a collection of steamy short romances brought to you by 12 of your favorite instalove authors.Coming November 2021.

Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild


Paul Gruchow - 1997
    Gruchow turns a naturalist's eye on a wilderness of wolves, moose, and loons as he visits national parks and other scenic spots. Drawing on the works of Thoreau and Wendell Berry, he explores the relationship of person to place.

Bird Cottage


Eva Meijer - 2016
    I want to find out how they behave when they're freeLen Howard was forty years old when she decided to leave her London life and loves behind, retire to the English countryside and devote the rest of her days to her one true passion: birds.Moving to a small cottage in Sussex, she wrote two bestselling books, astonishing the world with her observations on the tits, robins, sparrows and other birds that lived nearby, flew freely in and out of her windows, and would even perch on her shoulder as she typed.This moving novel imagines the story of this remarkable woman's decision to defy society's expectations, and the joy she drew from her extraordinary relationship with the natural world.

BEST FRIEND'S BABY


Layla Wilde - 2016
    Now he’s the father of my baby and a football star! We were inseparable until college took him away from me for two years. And it sucked. Reuniting with him meant one thing – mind-blowing, sheet-mingling time together. He was still the boy of my dreams – time apart or not. I never planned to be more than friends with him. Certainly didn’t plan for a friends-to-lovers tryst. But it happened. And it was good. And no, I won’t give him up. Who would want to give up a golden boy with endless blue eyes and messy hair? Victoria was perfect, maybe too perfect. She was everything I wanted but didn’t deserve. She was the perfect girl-next-door. You know, the naïve girl you love so but can never touch. The kind of girl whose heart you know you can’t break? But two years of watching her grow up via video chats had done a number on my heart. And now I want her – in my heart, in my bed, underneath me. I need her more than I cared to admit. Best Friend's Baby is a sexy romance series! This is book one of three books. All three books are complete and published!

Vesper Flights


Helen Macdonald - 2020
    Helen Macdonald's bestselling debut H is for Hawk brought the astonishing story of her relationship with goshawk Mabel to global critical acclaim and announced Macdonald as one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, launching poet and falconer Macdonald as our preeminent nature essayist, with a semi-regular column in the New York Times Magazine.In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate through the Tribute of Light, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.

No Nettles Required: The Reassuring Truth About Wildlife Gardening


Ken Thompson - 2006
    This book shows how easy it is to fill our gardens with everything from foxes, frogs and mice, to butterflies, ladybirds and thousands of fascinating creepy-crawlies.

At First Sight


Joy Ohagwu - 2019
    By a USA Today Bestselling Author.Tough and uncompromising undercover sheriff Asia Powers Bancroft had one goal--to bring crime extraordinaire Carlos Saint Magna to justice for tearing her town apart with criminal activity. This goal led her to choices that condensed to one thing--her family and her ability to protect them from the consequences of her job. But she hadn't known that choosing to bring Saint Magna down would alter her life irreversibly.
Now left for dead, she discovers that, through faith in Jesus, some new beginnings start with "The End".Sharon Parson had asked for more than she could handle when she showed up to teach a Christian career counseling class for a Youth Reading Club in a dangerous part of town, unaccompanied, for the second time. Caught in a shootout late at night, she never expected her on-and-off boyfriend, Ash Carter, to rescue her again--or for their love to bloom anew.
With Sharon hesitating over a relationship because of his lack of faith in God, and Ash eager for something permanent like marriage, will she have the love she dreamed of or will it come crashing at her feet before it begins?Get your copy now.

My Favourite Nature Stories


Ruskin Bond - 2016
    Its windows opened on to a well-forested hillside. So naturally I wrote about the trees, wild flowers, and birds and other creatures who lived among them. Then circumstances forced me to move higher up the mountain, and for the last thirty-five years I have lived on the top floor of Ivy Cottage, in Landour Cantonment. Here there are windows too, and they open on to the sky, clouds, the Doon valley and range upon range of mountains. And from this perch on the hillside I feel that I am part of the greater world, mother India as well as the natural world of planet Earth.’In this charming collection, Ruskin Bond talks about his various encounters with the natural world. From the chorus of cicadas to the song of the whistling thrush, from his love for sea shells to his favourite place on earth, Bond details why he has such an overwhelming love for nature. This book is for all who cherish the green world, just as Bond does.

Alone on the Shield


Kirk Landers - 2017
    She would marry a fellow antiwar activist and end up immigrating to Canada. He would fight in Vietnam and come home to build an American dream kind of life—a great career, a trophy wife, and a life of wealth and privilege. Forty years later, they have reconnected and discovered a shared passion: solo canoeing in Ontario’s raw Quetico wilderness. They decide to meet again to get caught up on old times, but not in a restaurant or coffee shop—they agree to meet on an island deep in the Quetico wilds. Though they try to control their expectations for the rendezvous, they both approach the island with a growing realization of the emotional void in their lives and wonder how different everything might have been if they had spent their lives together. They must overcome challenges just to reach the island, then encounter the greatest challenges of all—each other, and a weather event for the ages. Alone on the Shield is a story about the Vietnam war and the things that connect us. It is the story of aging Baby Boomers, of the rare kinds of people who paddle alone into the wilderness, and of the kind of adventure that comes only to the bold and the brave.

Piano Tide


Kathleen Dean Moore - 2016
    It seethes below the tides of the fictional town of Good River Harbor, a little village pressed against the mountains—homeland to bears, whales, and a few weather-worn families.In Piano Tide, the debut novel by award-winning naturalist, philosopher, activist and author Kathleen Dean Moore, we are introduced to town father Axel Hagerman, who has made a killing in this remote Alaskan harbor by selling off the spruce, the cedar, the herring and halibut. But when he decides to export the water from a salmon stream, he runs head-long into young Nora Montgomery, just arrived on the ferry with her piano and her dog. Nora has burned her bridges in the lower 48, and she aims to disappear into this new homeland, with her piano as her anchor. But when Axel’s next business proposition, a bear pit, turns lethal, Nora has to act. The clash, when it comes, is a spectacular and transformative act of resistance.

Made for Him


Alexis Ashlie - 2020
    It will give you the HEA that you crave with OTT everything. You don’t want to miss this one.

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss


Margaret Renkl - 2019
    Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents--her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father--and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child's transition to caregiver.And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds--the natural one and our own--"the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love's own twin."Illustrated by the author's brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.

The Seed Keeper


Diane Wilson - 2021
    Until, one morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato--where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they've inherited.On a winter's day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband's farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron--women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools.Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.

The Secret Life of the Forest


Richard M. Ketchum - 1970
    All of them - hikers, hunters, fishermen, campers, and canoeists - are drawn to the woods for some special reason. Yet few of them see the forest as a whole, as the web of life it truly is. Here, from New York Times bestselling author Richard M. Ketchum, is the extraordinary story of forests and the trees that comprise them.

The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New


Annie Dillard - 2016
    Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life—a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through backyards, a bookish teenager memorizes the poetry of Rimbaud—with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join Dillard in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillard’s elegance of mind.