Professor Stefan Buczacki is one of the world's most renowned botanists having written around 60 books including several standard works of reference. He spent 12 unbroken years as panellist and chairman on BBC Radio Four's Gardener?s Question Time. Join him as he uncovers the wild animals and plants that thrive among the headstones from the graveyard beetle to the mighty yew as he reveals the natural secrets to be found in God's Acre. From the earliest Pagan sites to modern urban cemeteries, burial grounds have always enjoyed a sacred, protected status in the history of society. Consequently, they have become tranquil oases in which wildlife can flourish - a microcosm of the natural habitat long since disappeared from the surrounding area. Buczacki explores the history of churchyards and the landscape as well as what can be done to conserve them for future generations. He looks at plants and fungi, lichens, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, birds and small creatures and shows how deeply churchyards are rooted in British history and literature. We can all look with fresh eyes and be better informed whether or not you are spiritually and religiously motivated. Chapter one opens aptly with Thomas Gray's 1751 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Includes beautiful coloured line art of creatures like frogs, bats, moles, crows and badgers to contemporary photographs, full page colour. 2018 first edition, satin pagemarker.

For all new mums and those welcoming new arrivals, this has been described as 'A quietly revolutionary little book' from the award winning young New Yorker. A slanted, enchanted miscellany, Galchen writes about babies and art (with wrongly shaped head) and babies in literature (rarer than dogs or abortions and often monstrous). She writes about the effort of taking a passport photo for a baby not yet able to hold up her head, and the frightening prevalence of orange as today's chic colour for baby gifts, about Frankenstein as a sort of baby, and a baby as a sort of Godzilla. She calls her baby the Puma, and in her calm, literary style makes remarks such as: 'The baby loves to look at photos of babies. And at drawings of babies. And although she doesn't play with other babies often, she observes them on the street with a special interest, with much more interest than she gives to a similarly aloof adult. Albeit with less attention than she would give to a dog. It's a very particular kind of interest, a mirror interest, I am guessing. She doesn't know yet that she is going to get bigger?' 130pp.

In this irresistible handbook, Brittany is brought to life with glorious colour photos and captions in five languages. The region has everything a visitor could ask for: sea, harbours, moorland, attractive small towns, prehistoric sites, castles, rivers and nature reserves. The world-famous coastline includes rugged headlands, granite cliffs and sheltered beaches, with the rocky Cap de Fréhel particularly celebrated for its wild beauty. The book starts with a spectacular aerial photo of the lighthouse of Petit Minou, surrounded by cliffs and a raging green sea. Brittany's ports include historic Rennes with its impressive architecture and authentic half-timbered façades. The forest of Brocéliande has long been associated with Arthurian legend and its tightly packed tree-trunks, half-visible in the mist, exude an eerie atmosphere. The Norman Chateau of Fougères is nowadays a celebrated tourist attraction, boasting a literary connection with Victor Hugo. The harbour of Saint Malo is a forest of masts with the city bastions rising above, and there is a wonderful photo of Mont St Michel silhouetted in mist with a flock of birds flying across the sunrise. Dinard is pictured with stripy blue and white tents on the beach, the fishing port Paimpol is captured in a sepia study, the Baie de Saint Brieuc is lonely and bleak, the Finisterre area includes the harbour of Morlaix into which two rivers flow under an imposing high viaduct, and the port of Roscoff has a long modern bridge to the isle of Batz. A spectacular photo shows the sea washing over a house on the island Ile de Sein, a one-hour crossing from the mainland. Brittany is home to 40,000 birds of 112 species, and the area is rich in folklore and tradition, featuring 66 different hairstyles and costumes. 320pp, softback, gorgeous colour photos on every page.

How do crabs understand the tides? What does a prawn know? How do sandhoppers inherit an inbuilt compass from their parents? How can the depth of one winkle guarantee the lives of its companions? Nicholson explores the natural wonders of the intertidal and our long human relationship with it. The physics of the seas, the biology of anemone and limpet, the long history of the Earth, and the stories we tell of those who have lived here all interconnecting this zone where philosopher, scientist and poet can meet and find meaning. What do our buried beliefs about the tidal sea reflect about our relationship to nature? The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes. Look down as you crouch over the shallows and you will find a periwinkle or a prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster of anemones ready to meet you. We have all fallen in love with the seaside and the rockpool became the heart of a kind of nature worship, 'these unruffled wells' of goodness and even happiness and we have inherited some of that Victorian longing for calm. In this world of flux 'hermit crabs are suddenly busy on the sea floor in their winkles and whelks like porters with trolleys at a station... some of those shells are encrusted with patches of the limy, self-hardening seaweed, the pink coralline. One has a sprig of wrack growing from its shell.' 'Effortlessly, in deft, sure and delightful prose, he segues through species, science and art to present tidal nature as a microcosm.' - Philip Hoare. There is a section of colour photographs, plus black and white images, diagrams, and figures and maps and also a fascinating look at planetary connections, tides and rocks, sacrifice, survival, belief and a look to the future and the world's uncertainty, its fierce interfolding of opportunity and threat which makes the sea one of the most revelatory and beguiling habitats on earth. Look beyond your own reflection in this wonderful historian's philosophy that the sea is not made of water. 370pp.

England is surrounded by a fringe of mud and pearls - tidal flats and marshes, holiday parks and petrochemical works, jagged cliffs and silver beaches. It has the isles of Canvey, Sheppey, Foulness, Wight and Dogs. Mersea, Wallasea, Two Tree and Rat. And the wild and rockier places of Lundy, the Scillies, Hilbre, the Farnes. Then there's the deserted wartime forts, oil platforms, lost lands of Doggerland and Lyonesse and off-shore wind turbines. These islands and their inhabitants not only cast varied lights on the mainland, they also possess their own peculiar stories, from the Barbary slavers who once occupied Lundy, to the ex-major who seized a wartime fort in the North Sea and declared himself Prince of Sealand. Ian Crofton embarks on a personal journey to a number of the islands encircling England, exploring some that were once places of refuge or holiness, and others that have become locations for prisons, rubbish dumps and military installations. He shows the ways in which England's islands have been formed and how they are constantly changing and his book is filled with excellent natural description, comic encounters, history and culture and he is the most engaging travelling companion. 286pp, 16 pages of colour photos, maps.

Captions, coloured backgrounds, huge graphic design illustrations, this is a world of wonder and playfulness as we marvel at birds' bizarre behaviours. Quirkily illustrated, this is a charming exploration of birds and the reasons we love them. From the Common Swift which can stay in the air continuously without landing for up to ten months at a time, even sleeping on the wing, to the tiny Goldcrest, Europe's smallest bird which can lay 1½ times its body weight in eggs every season, birds are fascinating and incredible creatures. With humorous anecdotes, fascinating facts and charming illustrations, the artist Misha Blaise covers art, science and humour in her fresh and original style in her illustrated gift book with 'handwritten' headers for the Arctic Tern, a female jacana, or the male red-backed fairywren (which has a puberty-like transition around age two.) Birds of the same species have different accents based on where they are from, and some birds have even been observed making and using tools... and more. Colour illus. 208pp.

Beautifully designed with modern graphic illustrations, bring home bouquets that brighten up your living room and learn ideas for planting bulbs and tubers that will bloom in early spring plus perennials for year-round colour. And all that from your balcony or windowsill which can bloom and grow abundantly throughout the seasons and also attract insects, bees and butterflies. It starts with the basics of pre-sowing and sowing, and working with the sun and preparing your boxes, then planting schemes for fresh and dried, sweet peas, wild and waving grasses, echinacea and sun flowers or a box full of beautiful blooming dahlias. Create a cottage garden box, a green winter box, late bloomers and winter colour and even learn the secret of cutting a lovely bunch of flowers or drying them. All about ready to use boxes, potting compost, seeds and flower facts and hardy plants you can sow direct into your box from April like the bupleurum, ox-eye daisy and pot marigold, one of which is edible! You can pickle the flower buds of the ox-eye daisy in vinegar for using as capers and all flowers will produce more buds if you keep cutting out the dead flowers. Includes planting 'recipes' in this beautifully illustrated 128 page book. Colour.

Life on Earth traced the development of animals? life from its beginnings some three thousand million years ago, and Living Planet concentrated on how plants and animals interact. In this final book in the trilogy, The Trials of Life sees Sir David Attenborough exploring the ways animals use their bodies and the way they behave. Behaviour is one of the most exciting aspects of natural history, full of action and drama - a killer whale surging up a beach to grab a young sea-lion, an ant navigating across a Saharan sand dune by taking repeated observations of the Sun, a mother bat fighting through crowds of begging infants on the roof of a cave in order to give her milk to her own baby and no other. Living creatures are ultimately driven to pass on their genes to the next generation and this is the prime objective of their existence. In achieving this they must face a whole succession of problems which are fundamentally the same whether the animals are spiders or squirrels, mice or monkeys, llamas or lobsters. The book takes the 12 key stages of life - arriving, growing up, finding food, hunting and escaping, finding the way, home-making, living together, fighting, friends and rivals, talking to strangers, courting, continuing the line - and looks at how the solutions are developed by different species in a huge variety of astounding ways. And this is without even considering the complexities of copulation as rivals are fought and a mate selected. It's all here, birth, sex and death. Superb colour photos throughout plus line art, 282 pages in a fully updated and reissued 2022 edition of the 1990 original text.

The book is a hymn to a sea passage of world-historical importance, combining social and cultural history, nature writing, travelogue and politics. 'He unloaded the lobster from the pot and put it in a tub, and they took out the spider crabs, their conkery shells crusted with acorn barnacles...' - Syman Jones, 'Everything I Found on the Beach.' From charting and cross current maps, Pirate Isle and Enlli, here are sherawees and sea-swallows, the craft of the sea, the Norman Invasion, the dockers of Dublin, urban geese, a frenzy of shipbuilding, wild geese winters, tempests and wrecks, nets and lines and the last invasion of Britain. Welshman Jon Gower charts a sea which has carried both Vikings and saints, invasion forces, royals and rebels, writers, musicians and fishermen. The divided but interconnected waters of the Irish Sea from the narrow North Channel through St. George's Channel to where the Celtic Sea opens out into the wide Atlantic have a turbulent history to match the violence of its storms. Gower is a sympathetic and interested pilot taking the reader to the great shipyards of Belfast and through the mass exodus of the starving during the Irish Famine in coffin boats bound for America. He follows the migrations of working men and women looking for work in England, and tells tales of more casual travellers, sometimes seasick, often homesick too. It is also a place where the rarest seabird in Europe visits its coast in summer while the rarest goose wings in during winter. Filled with seals and salt-tanged stories, lyrically written and fizzing with curiosity and vitality as the sea is itself. 308pp, colour photos and images. Map.

'Venturing out with my camera to take photographs of the landscape and wildlife that surround my farm in the Derbyshire Peak District offers many rewards on a daily basis... We have three resident Robins in our garden but Bobbin Robin is my favourite. I have the pleasure of her company for the past three years, during which time I have witnessed her tirelessly bringing up four clutches of chicks... Just turn the pages to discover a mere fraction of those special moments I have captured with my camera.' Bobbin and her friends have a huge social media audience with tens of thousands of viewers from the RSPB and on Facebook following their adventures daily. Open up these pages to see these goings-on of wildlife friends, Jim's very best pictures taken in this beautiful setting, expressing the mood and spontaneous character of each individual shot. With humorous captions like 'Number 29 in the Miss Slim Legs Competition' and 'Don't mess with me, and no, you can't come in.' Shown with a rather grumpy looking face. And polishing up her moves for Strictly, and singing her little heart out all the time wondering what Jim is putting out for her today. In flight with wings outstretched, a bird on a wire, landing on Jim's shoe as he snoozes in the hammock, under beautiful flowers and on mossy branches or landing on Christmas decorations or like an angel on a cloud of snow, this is a very characterful subject from the BBC Countryfile and Springwatch competition winner. 128pp, 24.8 x 17.8cm, full page colour photos throughout.