A charming walk through the hidden secrets of each of the 56 British species of trees by botanist and ecologist Ros Bennett. The mother and daughter team burrow into blossoms and berries, the chemistry of plants, the importance of fungi, the history of Britain's forests, why trees and forests are important before looking at identification using leaves, twigs and buds. Part three looks at species profiles of Britain's 52 mostly native trees from the conifers and broadleaf trees like the Scots pine and yew, box and crab-apple, buckthorns, elms, beech, oaks, hazels and hornbeams, wild privet, holly and elder. Daughter Nell's exquisite illustrations help identify each tree simply and confidently, and they are exquisitely detailed artworks in themselves. With tables and diagrams and families, in beautiful clear layout, the book will bring you closer to the natural world around you. 302pp, illus.

A Countryside Companion with 74 tips, tales and talking points by a father and daughter team who combine decades of practical knowhow with a passion for literature and lore. The countryside of course means different things to different people - long hours, hard work, or escapism, a place to play and dream or of course a backwater from which you ache to run away, or your happy place. It can seem timeless and perfect - that honeysuckle, those bluebells, bleat of lambs, sweet kiss of cider at the cricket, sharp bite of cold water in the dark pool on the high moor. It's all true but so are the blighted habitats and decimated wildlife, boarded-up pubs and cancelled bus routes. Fundamentally the authors want to show why the land (woods, fields, meadows, moors, gardens, footpaths) is the way it is, and its people (farmers, walkers, hunters, poachers, ravers and druids) are the way they are. They also want to shine a little light on the mistakes that have been made in the past and ideas about how we might do better in the future. Because they live in the Quantock Hills, their reference is skew west. We are invited to nibble some cheese (page 134), confront a cow (page 55), dive into farming past, present and future on pages 25, 60 and 338, consider the rights and wrongs of grand houses and their gardens, knock up some jam (page 239) or fashion your own crop circle (page 309). And there are poems and prose as we look closely at trees and the world beyond our towns and cities in all its pleasures and perplexities. 354pp, beautifully decorated pages including place names from old languages like Cornish and Northern French and delightful woodcut illus.

The Financial Times said, 'An illuminating glimpse of the chain reactions of human and physical geography.' This is a fascinating exploration of the lesser-known and more subtle borders across the earth, and the surprising ways in which they shape our lives. Our world has innumerable boundaries, ranging from the obvious like an ocean to the subtle differences in language or climate. Most of us cross invisible lines all the time, but do not stop to consider them. Here geographer Maxim Samson presents 30 such unseen boundaries, intriguing and unexpected examples of the myriad ways in which we collectively engage with and experience the world. From football fans in Buenos Aires to air quality in China, Paris' banlieues to sub-Saharan Africa's Malaria Belt, the existence or perceived existence of dividing lines has manifold implications for people, wildlife, and places. Football's no-go neighbourhoods, evolutionary splits, segregation along Detroit's infamous 8 Mile, to herds of deer that refuse to cross the former Iron Curtain, the book is a veritable treat for the armchair explorer. Fully illustrated with maps of each location in a new way of viewing our world in all its consistency and messiness too. 404pp.

Every essay is mesmerising in this collection of stories about household pets we dote on, animals we raise to end up as meat on our plates, creatures who could eat us for dinner, and the various tamed and untamed animals we share our planet with. Orlean discovers the delights of keeping chickens and in New Jersey meets a woman who has 23 pet tigers - something none of her neighbours knew about until one escapes. We meet the world's hardest-working donkeys find respite at a special clinic in Morocco, and in Iceland the world's most famous whale resists the efforts to set him free. We meet a show dog and a lost dog and a pigeon who knows exactly how to get home. Delightful and profound, stylish prose and precise research, observant and often howlingly funny, this is soothing storytelling. 256 page paperback, line art.

From baker, beekeeper and birdwatcher, to falconer, farrier and forager, join poet Angus and printmaker Lilly as they explore the British Isles, uncovering and celebrating our crafts and traditions. This collection of poetry and printmaking aims to capture and celebrate the heritage and craftsmanship through 30 poems with accompanying striking mono linocut prints. We read about the salt harvester walking beside the water's edge, the angler watching for hours on end like stooping herons on a rushing bend, the forester whose view is one of a thousand kind in solid spruce or wondering beech, the ploughman trudging in muddied land towing blade and plodding beast, the shepherd from head to source of upland flow. With hand and tool we are invited into the life and craftsmanship that stirs within the great British countryside. With glossary, superb design and illustrations. 96pp.

Written between 1838 and 1865 by the father of Charles Darwin, Doctor Robert Darwin, and after Robert's death in 1848 continued by Charles's sister Susan, this hitherto unknown garden diary was a chance discovery. Susan Campbell made the discovery in 1986 and spent the next 35 years researching its background before writing this book. It describes the horticultural and domestic activities at The Mount, a large house with extensive and beautiful gardens and pastures on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury. It was the home of the Darwin family from 1800 until Susan's death in 1866 and, in 1809, it was Charles's birthplace. It was in the seven acres that Charles climbed trees and learned to observe animals and plants, watched his mother keep doves and where he and his older brother set up a chemistry laboratory in the tool shed. The garden was designed by his parents Susannah Darwin (born into the Wedgwood family) and her physician husband Robert and took shape soon after their marriage in 1796. The garden included many striking features including a 680 foot long terrace walk, a steep river cliff, a large circular flower garden, and facilities for supplying the house with seasonable fruit and vegetables, as well as specialities like winter cucumbers and hot house delicacies such as pineapples and bananas. The great virtue of this garden diary is that it brings the garden vividly to life and the book is written by an internationally acknowledged garden historian and illustrator known for her writings on walled kitchen gardens. The book evokes the constant routines of planning, planting, pruning, mowing and harvesting, of the traffic between kitchen and garden, servants, family and friends, and with cosmic events such as the sight of Donati's Comet across the sky in 1858 witnessed, but what really matters is the passing of the seasons. A really beautifully designed volume with border decoration line art, beautiful typography, lists reproduced as were pencilled on sheets of paper watermarked 1858, lists of plants grown in the hothouse, stove-houses and vinery, the hybrid perpetuals and a month-by-month calendar of jobs and planting such as a new brick melon frame which took almost the whole of February 1844 to complete and the planting of mint, angelica and thyme, potatoes and rhubarb being forced in the frame and capsicums, mustard and cress and tomatoes sown. Outside sowings include parsley, lettuces, radishes, cauliflowers, turnips and more peas, beans, carrots and celery and the asparagus and strawberry beds are manured and the ground prepared for carrots. Full page colour photos, colour scale drawings on endpapers, modern colour photos, this is a very special garden history from a Victorian plus a modern gardener's viewpoint. 320 glamorous pages, 19.7 x 24.1cm. Colour.

Born in Edo present day Tokyo in 1752, Bosai was not just a painter poet but also a calligrapher and Confucian scholar and his 'Mountains of the Heart' is widely acknowledged as one of the finest Japanese woodblock books. Scenes include Smoke at the Beach, Poetic Ideas in the Summer Mountains and Pines Chant in a Thousand Valleys. Poet, free spirit and renowned master of ehon (art-book) tradition, the book explores Japan's landscape through the eyes of a renowned artist, and provides new perspectives on a rare painting collection. Ehon recorded Japanese life, culture and geography for hundreds of years, depicting homes lost in the mists of immense foothills, or small figures wandering through rolling valleys, houses and trees, waterfalls and willows. Bosai's collection elegantly portrays the relationship between man and his environment, inspiring reverence for nature's quiet power imbued with a sense of the bucolic tranquillity that the artist so lovingly immortalised with his rich and spontaneous style. His love of life is apparent in every beautiful brush stroke, faithfully reproduced in facsimile in this invaluable study of a landmark masterpiece. A glamorous 117 page George Braziller publication with 22 colour spreads and 22 black and white illustrations, 19.6 x 26.7cm.

The English formal garden of the late 17th and early 18th centuries reinvented the Ornamental Wilderness with its ornamental grove. In its mature form, the wilderness constituted mostly of the garden, shady and private, a place for retreat as well as social activity, with a seeming naturalness achieved through artifice. James Bartos celebrates the layout at Wrest Park, Chiswick and Stowe and many more besides. He begins with groves and trees in the English imagination, the Druids and patriotic plantations, he looks at design, hedges and planting, cabinets and open spaces for entertainment and continental precedents in Italy, France and Holland. He looks at the wilderness in England with its maze of hedges, simple geometry, complex geometry, the English Bosco, block planting, curves, the Artinatural, forest gardens and the shrubbery. There is the domed building of Chiswick Pavilion, alleyways and precise architecture as an arbiter of taste with Burlington and his attempt to imitate the Classical Roman world, Palladio and Jones. We meander into dead ends and walk on to other wildernesses along a serpentine river, an elm grove, an amphitheatre or a woodland at Castle Howard in Yorkshire; Vanbrugh with his first country house commission, London garden makers to the nobility and gentry and even Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736), who designed the rockwork, caves, cascades and watercourses within Wray Wood. Then of course there is the splendour of Hampton Court Palace and the walkways and mazes. This heavyweight beautiful publication is packed with colour photographs and examples throughout focussing on design manuals and individual gardens and landscapes with a wealth in engraved prints, maps and present-day photographs. Bartos considers the making, planting and maintenance of wildernesses, their continental precedents and thematic resonances - Classical, Biblical, Druidic, Patriotic - and their inevitable demise. Engagingly written and visually very pleasing. 296 large pages, 19 x 24.8cm. Satin pagemarker.

Oceans, rivers, forests, caves, deserts, skies and soil are home to extraordinary species from the tiny dragon-like olm to the colossal sequoia tree. They have survived for hundreds of thousands of years by adapting to unique environments, but their future remains far from certain. Their story is our story too. This book is a stunning homage to the planet's most mysterious, bizarre and wondrous creatures and plants, a love letter to life on Earth and an urgent summons to protect what is precious and lovely in our world. Exquisitely illustrated with beautiful full page, double page and other artworks in colour throughout, we meet the Amur tiger, Chinese crested tern, Kakapo, Sunda pangolin, dusky gopher frog, Andean condor, Javan rhinoceros, Ethiopian wolf and African grey parrot, all vanishing species that are diminished by wildlife trading, hunting or destruction of habitat. In the insect world we meet the pine hoverfly, dung beetles, lesser long-nosed bat, European turtledove and Iberian lynx and rust lemur, all species that grow out of soil, nourish it, or have been made rare by our use of land. Then there are species that live in the deep ocean, in coral reefs, mangroves and some of the species affected by Australian bush fires. The book is organised by air, water, soil and homo sapiens, and each beautiful drawing has been engraved, printed and coloured by hand by the author Beatrice Forshall in this beautiful Bloomsbury publication. 256 pages, 18.5 x 27cm.
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From tools and devices to construction and artistic expression, Max Adams explores wood, the material that has shaped human history. An archaeologist and woodsman, he explores themes of landscapes, knowledge and human connectiveness with the earth. As a material, wood has no equal in strength, resilience, adaptability and availability and has been our partner in the cultural evolution from woodland foragers to engineers of our own destiny. Tracing that partnership, Adams explores the role that wood has played in our own history as an imaginative, curious and resourceful species. He begins with an account of how early humans learned the properties and uses of wood and trees and investigates the influence of six basic devices - lever, wedge, windlass, sprig, cordage and float. From the simple bivouacs of hunter-gatherers to sophisticated wooden buildings such as stave churches, from the decorative arts to the humble woodworking of rustic furniture, he shows the great transformations through stories of carpenters, wheelwrights and fire bringers, potters and their kilns, of copper, tin, bronze, colliers, purification, alchemy and stories about the technology of bushfire told by the Ju/wasi hunter-foragers of the Kalahari Desert and their mastery of fire. An endlessly fascinating collection brought right up to date with wood management. Engravings and many illustrations, 441pp.