The Weed Forager's Handbook


Adam Grubb - 2012
    

Onward and Upward in the Garden


Katharine S. White - 1979
    Throughout and beyond those years she was also a gardener. In 1958, when her job as editor was coming to a close, White wrote the first of a series of fourteen garden pieces that appeared in The New Yorker over the next twelve years. The poet Marianne Moore originally persuaded White that these pieces would make a fine book, but it wasn't until after her death in 1977 that her husband, E. B. White, assembled them into this now classic collection.Whether White is discussing her favorite garden catalogs, her disdain for oversized flower hybrids, or the long rich history of gardening, she never fails to delight readers with her humor, lively criticism, and beautiful prose. But to think of Katharine White simply as a gardener, cautioned E. B. White in his introduction to the book, would be like insisting that Ben Franklin was simply a printer. Katharine White had vast and varied interests in addition to gardening and she brought them all to bear in the writing of these remarkable essays.Onward and Upward in the Garden is an essential book of enduring appeal for writers and gardeners in every generation. Intensely personal and charged with emotion, the essays remain timeless. Now in this new edition, White can be read and appreciated anew.

Be in a Treehouse: Design / Construction / Inspiration


Pete Nelson - 2014
    To that end, he shares the basics of treehouse construction with his own recent projects as case studies. Using photographs taken especially for this project along with diagrams, he covers the selection and care of trees, and explains the fundamentals of building treehouse platforms. To ignite the imagination, Nelson presents 27 treehouses in the United States, Europe, and Africa. The book will be indispensible to anyone who aspires to have a treehouse, from the armchair dreamer, to the amateur builder, to the professional contractor.

Rewild Yourself: 23 Spellbinding Ways To Make Nature More Visible


Simon Barnes - 2018
    We're forgetting it. We're no longer noticing it. We've lost the habit of looking and seeing and listening and hearing.But we can make hidden things visible, and this book features 23 spellbinding ways to bring the magic of nature much closer to home.Mammals you never knew existed will enter your world. Birds hidden in treetops will shed their cloak of anonymity. With a single movement of your hand you can make reptiles appear before you. Butterflies you never saw before will bring joy to every sunny day. Creatures of the darkness will enter your consciousness. And as you take on new techniques and a little new equipment, you will discover new creatures and, with them, new areas of yourself that had gone dormant. Once put to use, they wake up and start working again. You become wilder in your mind and in your heart. Once you know the tricks, the wild world begins to appear before you. For anyone who wants to get closer to the nature all around them and bring it back into focus, this is the perfect read.

Run Wild


Boff Whalley - 2012
    This is not a man who signs up to big city marathons and pounds the pavements. With his down to earth voice and a great sense of humour, Boff writes about how running brings a real world of discovery and adventure, from reaching the top of a mountain with the sun at your back and moon in front creating two shadows to running up Mt Fuji on a break from work. For Boff, running is about freedom, experiencing of the world, your place in it and generally just enjoying yourself. Running is a way to get back to that simplest of relationships - the one between our feet and the earth.

The Penguin Lessons


Tom Michell - 2015
    When the bird refuses to leave Tom's side, the young teacher has no choice but to take it with him and look after it. This is their story.

Small Space Garden Ideas


Philippa Pearson - 2014
    "Small Space Garden Ideas" is full of creative ideas for making use of every growing space available.From windowsills and hanging baskets to rooftop containers and vertical gardens, "Small Space Garden Ideas" shows you how to create a dream garden, through step-by-step projects from start to finish.

A Terrible Country


Keith Gessen - 2018
    His girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages. His dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects. It's the summer of 2008, and his bank account is running dangerously low. Perhaps a few months in Moscow are just what he needs. So Andrei sublets his room in Brooklyn, packs up his hockey stuff, and moves into the apartment that Stalin himself had given his grandmother, a woman who has outlived her husband and most of her friends. She survived the dark days of communism and witnessed Russia's violent capitalist transformation, during which she lost her beloved dacha. She welcomes Andrei into her home, even if she can't always remember who he is.Andrei learns to navigate Putin's Moscow, still the city of his birth, but with more expensive coffee. He looks after his elderly--but surprisingly sharp!--grandmother, finds a place to play hockey, a cafe to send emails, and eventually some friends, including a beautiful young activist named Yulia. Over the course of the year, his grandmother's health declines and his feelings of dislocation from both Russia and America deepen. Andrei knows he must reckon with his future and make choices that will determine his life and fate. When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists, Andrei's politics and his allegiances are tested, and he is forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed since he was a kid.A wise, sensitive novel about Russia, exile, family, love, history and fate, A Terrible Country asks what you owe the place you were born, and what it owes you. Writing with grace and humor, Keith Gessen gives us a brilliant and mature novel that is sure to mark him as one of the most talented novelists of his generation.

The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors


David George Haskell - 2017
    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."

The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet


David Okuefuna - 2008
    An internationalist and pacifist, Kahn believed that he could use the new autochrome—the world's first portable, true-color photographic process—to create a global photographic archive that would promote cross-cultural understanding and peace. Over the next twenty years, he sent a group of photographers to more than fifty countries around the world, amassing more than 72,000 images. Until recently his collection was all but forgotten. Now, a century after he began his "Archives of the Planet" project, this book—richly illustrated in color throughout—and the BBC series it follows are bringing Kahn's dazzling early twentieth-century pictures to a wide audience for the first time, and putting color into what we usually think of as a monochrome world.Kahn's photographers captured times, places, and people we simply do not expect to see in color photographs. They documented age-old cultures on the brink of being changed forever by war, modernization, and Westernization, recording the last years of Ireland's traditional Celtic villages and the late days of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. They photographed First World War soldiers in their trenches as well as the postwar celebrations in London. In the course of their travels, they also took the earliest color photographs in countries as varied as Vietnam and Brazil, Mongolia and Norway, Benin and the United States.After being financially ruined in the Great Depression, Kahn was forced to bring his project to a premature end, but today his collection of early color photographs is recognized as one of the world's most important. The Dawn of the Color Photograph makes it easy to see why.

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.

One Man's Garden


Henry Mitchell - 1992
    In the sequel to The Essential Earthman, the Washington Post columnist offers a harvest of sharp observations and humorous adventures gathered during a year in his garden, along with much down-to-earth advice on horticulture.

Dancing With Elephants


Kalyn Nicholson - 2019
    Covering topics from love and heartbreak to chaos and self-discovery, each poem is laced in a cozy, magical energy that is sure to hold the reader suspended in the in-between.

The Writer's Garden: How Gardens Inspired our Best-loved Authors


Jackie Bennett - 2014
    No one can doubt the importance of the garden in Roald Dahl's life as it was here where he worked, and here that he created James and the Giant Peach. And where would Jane Austen have been if she had never seen a ‘ walk’ , an ornamental lake, or a wilderness?Gardens hold a special place in many author’ s lives. For Beatrix Potter, Hill Top house was made possible by the new found freedom and wealth that a literary career can bring; for Sir Walter Scott, laying out his garden at Abbotsford was a way of distracting himself from mounting debts.In this book of 18 gardens and 20 writers, the author examines how the poet, writer, novelist derived a creative spirit from their private garden, how they tended and enjoyed their gardens, and how they managed their outdoor space.Jane Austen at Godmersham and Chawton Rupert Brooke at Grantchester John Ruskin at Brantwood Agatha Christie at Greenway Beatrix Potter at Hill Top Roald Dahl at Gipsy House Charles Dickens at Gad’ s Hill Place Virginia Woolf at Monk’ s House Winston Churchill at Chartwell Laurence Sterne at Shandy Hall George Bernard Shaw at Shaw’ s Corner Ted Hughes at Lumb Bank Henry James followed by E.F. Benson at Lamb House John Clare at Helpston Thomas Hardy at Hardy’ s Cottage and Max Gate  Robert Burns at Ellisland William Wordsworth at Cockermouth and Grasmere Walter Scott at Abbotsford Rudyard Kipling at Bateman’ s

Cutting Back: My Apprenticeship in the Gardens of Kyoto


Leslie Buck - 2017
    Leaving behind a full life of friends, love, and professional security, she became the first American woman to learn pruning from one of the most storied landscaping companies in Kyoto. Cutting Back recounts Buck’s bold journey and the revelations she has along the way. During her apprenticeship in Japan, she learns that the best Kyoto gardens look so natural they appear untouched by human hands, even though her crew spends hours meticulously cleaning every pebble in the streams. She is taught how to bring nature’s essence into a garden scene, how to design with native plants, and how to subtly direct a visitor through a landscape. But she learns the most important lessons from her fellow gardeners: how to balance strength with grace, seriousness with humor, and technique with heart.