Witch’s Garden describes over 50 of the world’s most powerful magical plants and their uses, mythical and proven. From the screaming Mandrake to calming St John’s Wort, the history of these esoteric species is often as dark and elusive as the art of herbalism itself. Including tales of remedies for everything from bad weather and broken hearts to protection from evil and the invocation of immortality, the book features exquisite botanical illustrations and fascinating specimens held within the archives of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, while archival images depicting occult practices evoke the bewitching nature of these mysterious species.

    She is the living embodiment of grandeur that was, and is, England. In this brilliantly researched book, Robert Lacey combines the sweep of history with the intimate nuance of individual lives to raise the curtain on the royal mystique. Here is the personal side of a Queen who adores the Beatles' Yellow Submarine and watches Kojak on the telly - and an enthralling view of the passions and drama behind the world's greatest remaining monarchy.

    The beautiful animals immortalized in Disney 's "Bambi" are also the garden 's biggest pests. Increased hunting regulations have caused the deer population to swell to more than 30 million. At the same time, suburban expansion has led to a loss of natural habitat. The result? Deer are looking for food and finding it in gardens all across the country."50 Beautiful Deer-Resistant Plants" makes keeping deer away as simple as choosing the appropriate plant. Instead of the typical barriers and fencing, expert plantswoman Ruth Rogers Clausen has chosen the 50 most beautiful (and least palatable) annuals, bulbs, ferns, grasses, herbs, perennials, and shrubs. Whether it 's the charming snow crocuses that bloom each spring or the vibrant, long-blooming Texas Sage, these 50 plants provide gardeners a chance to design a deer-proof garden without sacrificing style. Each plant profile includes a deer-resistance scale, tips on growth and care, zone recommendations, and gorgeous color photos showing the plant up close and in the garden setting. Also includes dozens of companion planting ideas. With the helpful and trusted advice in "50 Beautiful Deer-Resistant Plants," gardeners can finally garden without fear of deer.

    Now, Haskell brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans. Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world, exploring the trees connections with webs of fungi, bacterial communities, cooperative and destructive animals, and other plants. An Amazonian ceibo tree reveals the rich ecological turmoil of the tropical forest, along with threats from expanding oil fields. Thousands of miles away, the roots of a balsam fir in Canada survive in poor soil only with the help of fungal partners. These links are nearly two billion years old: the fir s roots cling to rocks containing fossils of the first networked cells. By unearthing charcoal left by Ice Age humans and petrified redwoods in the Rocky Mountains, Haskell shows how the Earth s climate has emerged from exchanges among trees, soil communities, and the atmosphere. Now humans have transformed these networks, powering our societies with wood, tending some forests, but destroying others. Haskell also attends to trees in places where humans seem to have subdued nature a pear tree on a Manhattan sidewalk, an olive tree in Jerusalem, a Japanese bonsai demonstrating that wildness permeates every location. Every living being is not only sustained by biological connections, but is made from these relationships. Haskell shows that this networked view of life enriches our understanding of biology, human nature, and ethics. When we listen to trees, nature s great connectors, we learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty."

    . .Based on the true story of the shocking murder of Mrs Caroline Luard, which took place in Kent in August 1908.Caroline Luard is shot dead in broad daylight in the grounds of a large country estate. With few clues available, her husband soon becomes the suspect . . . But is he guilty?Bringing to life the people involved in this terrible crime, in A Dreadful Murder bestselling author Minette Walters uses modern detective skills to attempt to solve a 100-year-old crime.

    Finally, the collected wit and wisdom of the magazine's most irreverent and beloved columnist can be found in a single A - Z volume, providing gardeners from coast-to-coast with his valuable tips for planting, troubleshooting, and growing flowers, vegetables, shrubs, trees and more, all delivered in his signature cantankerous style.Sidebars throughout the book - "Ask Grumpy" - help readers tackle common garden problems ("How do I get ride of little house ants?"), and readers from the past 35 years take part in the book when Grumpy shares his favorite reader's responses to some of his advice, his favorite rules for gardening, and Q & A's covering your favorite plants and flowers are all inside. Additionally, beautiful line-drawings and illustrations throughout make the book as beautiful to look at as well as entertaining to read.The Grumpy Gardener is sure to become the most trusted tool in your gardening shed!

    . .We know what life was like for Victoria and Albert, but what was it like for a commoner? How did it feel to cook with coal and wash with tea leaves? Drink beer for breakfast and clean your teeth with cuttlefish? Dress in whalebone and feed opium to the baby? Catch the omnibus to work and wash laundry while wearing a corset? How To Be A Victorian is a new approach to history, a journey back in time more intimate, personal, and physical than anything before. It is one told from the inside out--how our forebears interacted with the practicalities of their world--and it's a history of those things that make up the day-to-day reality of life, matters so small and seemingly mundane that people scarcely mention them in their diaries or letters. Moving through the rhythm of the day, from waking up to the sound of a knocker-upper man poking a stick at your window, to retiring for nocturnal activities, when the door finally closes on twenty-four hours of life, this astonishing guide illuminates the overlapping worlds of health, sex, fashion, food, school, work, and play.If you liked The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century or 1000 Years of Annoying the French, you will love this book.

    In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind.Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. We meet Browne the master prose stylist, responsible for introducing hundreds of words into English, including electricity, hallucination, and suicide. Aldersey-Williams reveals how Browne’s preoccupations—how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in nature, how to unite science and religion—are relevant today.In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more than just a biography—it is a cabinet of wonders and an argument that Browne, standing at the very gates of modern science, remains an inquiring mind for our own time. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, Browne is "unnervingly one of our most adventurous contemporaries."

    Join Susan as she recounts her lighthearted ramble of discovery through the historical homes and gardens of art and literary heroes, along ancient footpaths, through wildflower meadows and fields of lambs, into tea rooms, pubs and antique stores. This lovely hard-cover book includes hundreds of photographs and a red ribbon sewn-in book mark. A Fine Romance is a work of art, part love story, part travel guide and all dream come true.

    Her legacy is the RSPB, grown from an all-female pressure group of 1889 with the splendidly simple pledge: Wear No Feathers.Etta’s long battle against ‘murderous millinery’ triumphed with the Plumage Act of 1921 – but her legacy has been eclipsed by the more glamorous campaign for the vote, led by the elegantly plumed Emmeline Pankhurst.This gripping narrative explores two formidable heroines and their rival, overlapping campaigns. Moving from the feather workers’ slums to high society, from the first female political rally to the rise of the eco-feminist, it restores Etta Lemon to her rightful place in history – the extraordinary woman who saved the birds.

    Fields, farms, hills and hedgerows appear altered, the wildlife behaves differently, and over time the terrain itself is transformed.In Rain, Melissa Harrison explores our relationship with the weather as she follows the course of four rain showers, in four seasons, across Wicken Fen, Shropshire, the Darent Valley and Dartmoor.Blending these expeditions with reading, research, memory and imagination, she reveals how rain is not just an essential element of the world around us, but a key part of our own identity too.

    Too little money. An abusive father too drunk to notice his family is starving. This is the true story of a little girl's struggle to survive against the odds in the slums of 1920s south-east London.'We ain't got no drink, Pa.'I trembled as I spoke. Then somewhere inside me I found the anger, the courage to answer him back.'We don't have no grog cos you drank it all!'I knew he was going for me tonight, so I reckoned I might as well go down fighting after all.Growing up in the slums of 1920s and 30s Bermondsey, Hilda Kemp's childhood was one of chaos and fear. Every day was battleground, a fight to survive and a fight to be safe.For Hilda knew what it was to grow up in desperate poverty: to have to scratch around for a penny to buy bread; to feel the seeping cold of a foggy docklands night with only a thin blanket to cover her; to share her filthy mattress with her brothers and sisters, fighting for space while huddling to keep warm. She knew what it was to feel hunger - not the impatient growl of a tummy that has missed a meal; proper hunger, the type that aches in your soul as much as your belly.The eldest of five children, Hilda was the daughter of a hard drinker and hard hitter as well. A casual dockworker by day, a bare-knuckle fighter by night and a lousy drunk to boot, her pa honed his fists down the Old Kent Road and Blackfriars, and it was Hilda or her ma who bore the brunt of them at home.This is the powerful and moving memoir of Hilda's childhood growing up in dark, filthy, crime-ridden Bermondsey; a place where you knew your neighbours, where you kept your eyes down and your ears shut as defence against the gangs at war in the streets. It's a time when days were spent running wild down the docklands, jumping onto barges and stealing coal, racing through the dank back-streets of east London like water rats, dodging the milk cart or the rag-and-bone man.And out of this bleak landscape emerges a brave, resilient young girl whose life is a testament to the power of love and good humour. Moving, dazzling and sombre by turns, once opened this brilliant, seductive book will not let you rest.

    It is the relationship between Elizabeth and her Scottish cousin Mary Stuart that is often discussed and pondered over while the relationship between Elizabeth and her own half sister is largely forgotten. Yet it is the relationship with Mary Tudor that forged Elizabeth’s personality and set her on the path to queenship. Mary’s reign was the darkest period in Elizabeth’s life. “I stood in danger of my life, my sister was so incensed against me,” Elizabeth reminded her councillors when they pressed her to name a successor.It is time to tell the whole story of the fierce rivalry between the Tudor half sisters who became their father’s successors.

    For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death.In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man…Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists—and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.

    Downton Abbey was no different. But what would our beloved Crawley household have eaten at their sacred 4 o’clock institution? In Tea at Downton - Afternoon Tea Recipes From The Unofficial Guide to Downton Abbey we share the recipes of the golden age of England. At the height of the power of the British Empire, Mrs Patmore would have every possible kind of delicious ingredients to draw from. In this book you’ll learn: • Step by step through how to throw the perfect tea party – Downton Style. From the etiquette behind how to hold one’s tea cup correctly to the recipe for the favourite sandwich of Queen Alexandra of the time. • Wow all of your friends with these simple to follow authentic recipes, and be sure even the Dowager Duchess would be impressed by your social graces. • From the bottom tier sandwiches to the elegant cakes of the top tier, we cover it all. Not forgetting of course the perfect scone recipe and its accompanying jams. • Follow the ways Mrs Patmore would have planned her menus to keep spending to minimum and you too can enjoy a most delightful repast for just a few shilling! So, what are you waiting for? Carson has opened the door to let you in. Let’s see what’s for tea.... Scroll up and get your copy of Tea at Downton - Afternoon Tea Recipes From The Unofficial Guide to Downton Abbey. You’ll be glad you did!