But can you make that trendy new lamp jibe with your grandmother's heirloom dresser?The fabulous Beekman Boys answer with a resounding "Yes!" in their new book, Beekman 1802 Style. Through more than 200 stunning photographs from Country Living magazine and never-before-seen images of the Beekman farmhouse, the boys use their city-turned-country-boy charm and style to help with all things home. Their unique home design tips and tricks for mixing high and low, East and West, indoors and outdoors, and traditional with modern will help you create a home that is inviting, warm, and--perhaps most important--fabulous.

    Written by Arizona t.v. gardening guru, the "Garden Guy," David Owens covers topics including watering, design, tools, schedules, fertilizing, companion planting, and soils.

    It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order. Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms. The philosophy behind permaculture is one of working with, rather than against, nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action; of looking at systems in all their functions rather than asking only one yield of them; and of allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions.

     "The genius of Hanson's fascinating, inspiring, and entertaining book stems from the fact that it is not about how all kinds of things grow from seeds; it is about the seeds themselves." -- Mark Kurlansky, New York Times Book Review We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life: supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and pepper drove the Age of Discovery, coffee beans fueled the Enlightenment and cottonseed sparked the Industrial Revolution. Seeds are fundamental objects of beauty, evolutionary wonders, and simple fascinations. Yet, despite their importance, seeds are often seen as commonplace, their extraordinary natural and human histories overlooked. Thanks to this stunning new book, they can be overlooked no more. This is a book of knowledge, adventure, and wonder, spun by an award-winning writer with both the charm of a fireside story-teller and the hard-won expertise of a field biologist. A fascinating scientific adventure, it is essential reading for anyone who loves to see a plant grow.

    A die-cut cover acts as a window onto a simpler world of lighter living and sustainability that never sacrifices function or design.Imagine living debt-free in an environmentally-friendly home. No mortgage, no clutter, and boundless freedom. This is the reality and dream of people all over the world thanks to the widespread momentum of the tiny house movement in recent years. Designed to fit on the tiniest of coffee tables, this book features 250 full-color photographs of the smallest, most efficient homes around the world, with interviews, features, and smart tips straight from the homeowners. From tiny mobile homes in California, Nashville, and Minnesota to a surfer-built tree house in Washington to a school bus that has been converted to a camper in Oregon, this lookbook is packed with big inspiration.

     Childhood fantasy meets grown-up savoir faire   The idea of climbing a tree for shelter, or just to see the earth from another perspective, is surely as old as humanity. Tree houses are chronicled in ancient civilizations and their lore crosses through the history of every part of the world where trees grow. This stunningly-illustrated study offers a tour of the best tree houses in the world, some designed by architects, others the work of unknown craftsmen. A teahouse, a restaurant, a hotel, a playhouse for children, or a perch from which to contemplate life—the tree house can take as many forms as the imagination can offer. In times of concern for sustainability and ecological responsibility, the tree house may also be the ultimate symbol of life in symbiosis with nature. Whether rustic or contemporary in style, tree houses make the most of space. Climb into this trove of tree houses and enjoy a new perspective on the world.   50 tree houses from around the world Covers all different styles, from romantic to modern Every house is depicted in several photos as well as one illustration byartist Patrick Hruby from Los Angeles (who also created the book’s cover artwork) Helpful short biographies of all architects

    As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.

    From the expanse of the metropolis to the detail of the window box, they address the pressing challenges of urban development with easy-to-follow advice and broad array of best practices.With their landmark book Suburban Nation, Andres Duany and Jeff Speck set forth more clearly than anyone has done in our time the elements of good town planning (The New Yorker). With this long-awaited companion volume, the authors have organized the latest contributions of new urbanism, green design, and healthy communities into a comprehensive handbook, fully illustrated with the built work of the nation's leading practitioners. The Smart Growth Manual is an indispensable guide to city planning. This kind of progressive development is the only way to fully restore our economic strength and create new jobs, new industries, and a renewed ability to compete in the first rank of world economies. -- Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San FranciscoAuthors Andres Duany, Jeff Speck, and Mike Lydon have created The Smart Growth Manual, a resource which not only explains the overarching ideals of smart growth, but a manual that takes the time to show smart growth principles at each geographic scale (region, neighborhood, street, building). I highly recommend [it] as a part of any community participant's or urban planner's desktop references. -- LocalPlan.orgPlanetizen Top 10 Books - 2010 On the ninth annual list of the ten best books in urban planning, design and development: The goal of The Smart Growth Manual is clear from page 1: to create a guidebook for smart growth following the pattern of the Charter for New Urbanism. Duany, Speck and Lydon have achieved that in spades (the Charter is included in the appendix, in case we missed the connection). It even clears up some of the architectural arguments that attach themselves to New Urbanists, such as this segment of Section 14.1, Regional Design; 'While new buildings should not be compelled to mimic their historic predecessors, designers should pay attention to local practices regarding materials and colors, roof pitches, eave lengths, window-to-wall ratios, and the socially significant relationship of buildings to their site and the street; these have usually evolved in intelligent response to local conditions.' In addition to making the old 'traditional vs. modern' argument irrelevant, Duany, Speck and Lydon have truly managed to boil down the best parts of current practices into a highly readable, portable book.

    Take a closer look, though, and you'll see that the diversity and variety of plant species that form hedgerows, and the animals and insects that they shelter, are a complete world of delight.Angelica to ash, bird cherry to borage, pineapple weed to plantain and wild garlic to wimberries, The Hedgerow Handbook is a directory of our best known and most useful hedgerow plants, each entry botanically illustrated in colour to help you identify the plant or flower, along with its history and folklore, and its culinary and medicinal uses, from the traditional to the unusual.The ultimate guide for nature-lovers and foragers alike, discover how you can transform wild and natural hedgerow ingredients into fresh and delicious recipes. From Elderflower Champagne and Blackberry Sorbet to Wild Raspberry and Meadowsweet Jam, the hedgerow has more possibilities than you could ever imagine.

    Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature’s path through the seasons, he brings the forest and its inhabitants to vivid life.Each of this book’s short chapters begins with a simple observation: a salamander scuttling across the leaf litter; the first blossom of spring wildflowers. From these, Haskell spins a brilliant web of biology and ecology, explaining the science that binds together the tiniest microbes and the largest mammals and describing the ecosystems that have cycled for thousands—sometimes millions—of years. Each visit to the forest presents a nature story in miniature as Haskell elegantly teases out the intricate relationships that order the creatures and plants that call it home.Written with remarkable grace and empathy, The Forest Unseen is a grand tour of nature in all its profundity. Haskell is a perfect guide into the world that exists beneath our feet and beyond our backyards.

    His method emphasizes speed, confidence, and relaxation, while incorporating many time-saving tricks of the trade.

    Wherever you are right now, the chances are that there are worms, woodlice, centipedes, flies, silverfish, wasps, beetles, mice, shrews and much, much more, quietly living within just a few paces of you.Dave Goulson gives us an insight into the fascinating and sometimes weird lives of these creatures, taking us burrowing into the compost heap, digging under the lawn and diving into the garden pond. He explains how our lives and ultimately the fate of humankind are inextricably intertwined with that of earwigs, bees, lacewings and hoverflies, unappreciated heroes of the natural world.The Garden Jungle is at times an immensely serious book, exploring the environmental harm inadvertently done by gardeners who buy intensively reared plants in disposable plastic pots, sprayed with pesticides and grown in peat cut from the ground. Goulson argues that gardens could become places where we can reconnect with nature and rediscover where food comes from. With just a few small changes, our gardens could become a vast network of tiny nature reserves, where humans and wildlife can thrive together in harmony rather than conflict.For anyone who has a garden, and cares about our planet, this book is essential reading.

    Presented in an eye-popping package and filled with hyperdetailed photography of individual buds, this essential guide to marijuana is smart, practical, and exceedingly beautiful. The "Primer" section explores the culture of this complex flower and explains the botany that makes each strain unique. The "Buds" section describes the variations of lineage, flavor, and mental or physical high that define 170 exceptional strains. Poised to become the go-to marijuana guide for recreational and medicinal users alike, Green is easy to pick up and impossible to put down.

    Yet residents of compact urban centers, David Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan--the most densely populated place in North America--rank first in public-transit use and last in per-capita greenhouse gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation. These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn't reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world's nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

    One response to high levels of complexity and overstimulation is to look for yet another gadget or closet organizer to simplify our lives. But the answer lies somewhere else. The road to a simpler more satisfying life begins with a clear-eyed examination of the choices we are making for our time--and that includes choices about where we want to live.The Simple Home presents six paths to simplicity, each illustrated by human-scaled, unadorned homes with straightforward floor plans and forms. These are open, light-filled homes (with rooms or spaces that are often multipurpose) that express their beauty in their utility and practicality. Simple homes are low maintenance and often green, designed for homeowners who wish to embody a different set of values in their housing choices than the run-of-the-mill starter castles littering the landscape.The 6 Paths to Simplicity: 1. Simple is Enough 2. Simple is Thrifty 3. Simple is Flexible 4. Simple is Timeless 5. Simple is Sustainable 6. Simple is Refine