Fascinating study of our relationship with birds, from hunting to providing us with food, as messengers, guardians, omens, deities, metaphors, symbols and inspiration. Many illustrations.
Its second subtitle is "an adventurous history of botany". JG is a scientist and an historian of exploration (his "The Rattlesnake: A Voyage of Discovery to the Coral Sea" was excellent).
An American voice on the environmental disaster of post-war industrial agriculture, and the positive signs of recovery from poly-cultural farms and permaculture embraced by a new generation ... read more
The dewy, rolling hills, as witnessed by Hardy, Shepherd, Macfarlane, Macdonald, and a gaggle of brilliant, lesser-known writers. (This volume is testament to the genre's true diversity, whi... read more
Beekeepers of the world unite! And all lovers of bees and the natural world, ho hum. This is an excellent cultural history of apiculture and was a bestselling book in Sweden last year.
The abundance of the Cambrian explosion after half a billion years of an ice-bound world... the author is a geologist so quite at ease with unimaginable stretches of time.
An unpicking of the anthropocentric view of the natural world that has bedevilled the West since Aristotle, and whose consequences we now reap: by the author of Dadland, winner of the Costa ... read more
Returning to her native Bulgaria, the acclaimed writer explores the valley of the Mesta and encounters its inhabitants and their traditions of plant-lore. Her previous books have been outsta... read more
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Pierre Magnol to Sir David Attenborough, via Lady Gaga... The author is, amongst other roles, the president of the Linnaean Society.
The poet walks ten landscapes that were significant for the Romantics - Shelley, Barrett Browning, Constable, Wordsworth and others - from Kent to Scotland: a mix of memoir, reverie, and ref... read more
Tangled, mossy, temperate rainforest still prevails in some valleys and creases of these isles - though it seems hard to imagine after these months of drought... And the author's name is of ... read more
Landscape preservation through the lives of Octavia Hill (London), Beatrix Potter (Lake District), Pauline Dower (Northumberland), and Sylvia Sayer (Dartmoor).