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Autumnal Tints
Henry David Thoreau(1862) 62pages

October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight. I formerly though that it would be worth the while to get a specimen leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from the green to the brown state, outline it, and copy its color exactly, with paint in a book... I have made but little progress toward such a book, but I have endeavored, instead, to describe all these bright tints in the order in which they present themselves. The following are some extracts from my notes. - from the author's introductory paragraphs (Applewood)



Bees: Lectures by Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) translated by Thomas Braatz (1998) 222pages with an Afterword on the Art of Joseph Beuys

In 1923 Steiner predicted the dire state of the honeybee today. He said then in fifty to eighty years we would see the consequences of mechanizing the forces that had previously operated organically in the beehive, such as the practice of artificially breeding queen bees. The fact that over sixty percent of the American honeybee population has died during the past ten years and that this same phenomena is occurring around the world should urge our attention to the importance of the issues discussed in these lectures. From physical depictions of the daily activities of bees to the loftiest esoteric insights, the lecture describe the unconscious wisdom contained in the beehive and its connection to our experience of health, culture, and the cosmos. This book includes the essay by David Adams "From the Queen Bee to Social Sculpture: The Artistic Alchemy of Joseph Beuys (1921-86)" (Anthroposophic Press)



A Book of Bees...and How to keep Them
Sue Hubbell (1988) 193pages

I delight in moving back and forth between two ways of living, one reflecting off the other, clarifying both in the process. I like knowing how to use the subway as well as to bring proper function back to my 1954 pickup when it becomes balky out in a remote bee yard. I like seeing both experimental theater on Fourteenth Street and deer grazing winter grasses at twilight on my Ozark hillside. I like pulling on a baggy bee suit, forgetting myself and getting as close to the bees' lives as they will let me, remembering in the process that there is more to life than the merely human. I like company and learning to say "we" again. I like solitude. I like loving a man and I like being loved by him. - from the author's Afterword (Mariner / Houghton Mifflin)



Bringing a Garden to Life
Carol Williams (1998) 275pages

This book is for people who love gardening and for those who I hope soon will. It is intended as a guide to making a garden and sustaining it as it grows and changes. The aim is to encourage, so the book tries for simplicity; no previous experience is necessary to follow the instructions. But while it may be simple, it suggests no shortcuts to a quick result, because here no result is more desired than the enjoyment of the work at hand. "Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing," wrote Shakespeare, who must have known. This is true of all of life, but, in my experience, nowhere more transparently than in the garden, where the gardener's activity joins with that of seeds that sprout, buds unfolding, green wood turning to brown. - from the author's Introduction (Bantam)



Elevating Ourselves: Henry David Thoreau on Mountains
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) edited by J. Patrick Huberr (1999) 109pages

"On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning,: wrote Thoreau wrote, and in this book we climb with him to the tops of the mountains that gave him hope. J.Parker Huber is also along for the climb, comparing what Thoreau saw in his era with what we can see today. (Mariner / Houghton Mifflin)



Heartwood: Meditations on Southern Oaks
Poetry by Rumi, Photographs by William Guion (1998) 80pages

A photographer friend told me once that to make more powerful and personal photographs I needed to find something I love and photograph it - over and over and over. When iI looked around my native Louisiana, I found myself inexplicably drawn to the oaks. The more I slowed my pace to match theirs, the more the trees revealed their individual character and moods. The more I explored my deep feelings for them, the more I learned about myself and the magic and wonder of the oaks. As Rumi points out, everything has the potential to teach us. We need only be awake to our experiences and be willing to learn. - from the photographer's Introduction (Bulfinch Press)



The Immense Journey
Loren Eiseley (1957) 210pages

In an unusual blend of scientific knowledge and imaginative vision, Loren Eiseley tells the story of man. Anthropologist and naturalist, Dr. Eiseley reveals life's endless mysteries in his own experiences, departing from their immediacy into meditations on the long past, wandering - intimate with nature - along the paths and byways of time, and then returning to the present. (Vintage)



Lilies of the Hearth: The Historical Relationship Between Women & Plants
Jennifer Bennett (1991) 191pages

I finally realized, by the time, I had gathered countless bits of information about Mother Earth, witchcraft, botany, flower gardening and the like, that the prehistoric association of women with useful plants, fertility, nurturing and the earth is so deeply ingrained in humanity, it has never really been lost, whatever changes societies have endured and however separate from nature the modern world may seem to be. Throughout the centuries, this relationship has been manifested in different ways., but always, it has simultaneously limited, defined and freed women. That long, floral, sweetly scented, dangerous, romantic path women share with plants is expressed at the end of the 20th century in the environment movement, with its renewed appreciation of Mother Nature as both creator and destroyer. In writing this book, my aim has been to produce not an encyclopaedia of women in horticulture but a general overview of what became, for me, a fascinating perspective on the history of women. - from the author's Introduction (Camden House)



The Sanctuary Garden: Creating a Place of Refuge in Your Yard or Garden
Christopher Forrest McDowell & Tricia Clark-McDowell (1998) 188pages

My earliest recollection of the feeling of sanctuary, as I would now describe it, came when I was a girl of six or seven. Standing in our backyard in a quarter-acre bed of lilies-of -the valley, my nose buried in a fragrant bouquet held lovingly in my hands, I was in heaven....I still grow lilies-of the valley and climb mountains, though I now live thousands of miles from my childhood home. And I carry in me the flowering of those soulful seeds planted so long ago. Within each of us, noble seeds have been sown, somewhere, sometime. They silently grow over the years, stimulating us to manifest our deepest desires. Can we remember? More importantly, are we watering them and nurturing them day by day in the deep, rich tilth of our soul's yearning for fulfillment? ... The garden has long been a metaphor for life. Its roots are anchored in Paradise - a sacred place where body and soul can dwell in grace. The garden has also mirrored our human play and celebration of Nature. By enclosing a small portion of this Earth in a garden, we have created an unwritten covenant with the Divine: that we will respect, honor, and enhance that which Nature has to offer. Beyond its practical aspects, gardening - be it the soil or soul - can lead us on a philosophical and spiritual exploration that is nothing less than a journey into the depths of our own sacredness and the sacredness of all beings. - from the authors' Introduction (Fireside)



The Secret Life of Plants: physical, emotional, & spiritual relations between plants & man.
Peter Tompkins & Christopher Bird (1973) 402pages

Over half a century ago, (a gifted Viennese biologist, Raoul) France , who believed plants to be possessed of all the attributes of living creatures including "the most violent reaction against abuse and the most ardent gratitude for favors," could have written a Secret Life of Plants, but what he had already put into print was either ignored by the establishment or considered heretically shocking. It has taken the startling discoveries of several scientific minds in the 1960s to bring the plant world sharply back to the attention of mankind. Even so there are skeptics who find it hard to believe that plants may at last be the bridemaids at a marriage of physics and metaphysics. Evidence now supports the vision of the poet and the philosopher that plants are living, breathing, communicating creatures, endowed with personality and the attributes of soul. It is only we, in our blindness, who have insisted on considering them automata. Most extraordinarily, it now appears that plants may be ready, willing, and able to cooperate with humanity in the Herculean job of turning this planet back into a garden from the squalor and corruption of what England's pioneer ecologist William Cobbett would have called a "wen." - from the authors' Introduction (Harper Perennial, 1989)



The Sense of Wonder
Rachel Carson (1965) Photographs by Nick Kelsh 112pages

First published more than three decades ago, this reissue of Rachel Carson's award winning classic brings her unique vision to a new generation of readers. Stunning new photographs by Nick Kelsh beautifully complement Carson's intimate account of adventures with her young nephew, Roger, as they enjoy walks along the rocky coast of Maine and through dense forests and open fields, observing wildlife, strange plants, moonlight and storm clouds, and listening for the "living music" of insects in the underbush. "If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder," writes Carson, "he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in." (Harper Collins, 1998)



Snow Crystals: 2453 illustrations as photographed by W.A.Bentley
W.A. Bentley and W.J. Humphreys (1931/1962)

For almost half a century, Bentley caught and photographed thousands of snow flakes in his workshop at Jericho, Vermont, and made available to scientists and art instructors samples of his remarkable work. In 1931, the American Meteorological Society gathered together the best of these photomicrographs, plus some slides of frost, glaze, dew on vegetation and spider webs, sleet, and soft hail, and a text by W.J. Humphreys, and had them published. This book is here reproduced, unaltered and unabridged. The introductory text covers the technique of photographing snow crystals, classification, the fundamentals of cyrstallography, and markings. There are also brief discussions of the nature and cause of ice flowers, windowpane frost, dew, rime, sleet, and graupel. (Dover)



The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage
Chet Raymo (1986) 209pages

What is the universe? ...And what is this thing called life that dances on the surface of creation like an abiding flame? The answers from the new astronomy present us with sweeps of space and time that seem wildly incommensurate with the human scale....Many among us would prefer to retreat into a comfortable cloud of unknowing. But if we are truly interested in knowing who we are, then we must be brave enough to accept what our senses and our reason tell us. We must enter into the universe of the galaxies and the light-years, even at the risk of spiritual vertigo, and know what after all must be known. But to know is only half, as the naturalist John Burroughs said; to love is the other half. The pages that follow are an exercise in knowing and loving, a personal pilgrimage into the darkness and the silence of the night sky in quest of a human meaning...The pilgrimage is one that each one of us must make alone, into the realm of the stars and galaxies, to the limits of the universe, to that boundary of space and time where the mind and heart encounter the ultimate mystery, the known unknowable. It is a pilgrimage in quest of the soul of the night. - from the author's Preface (Hungry Mind Press, 1992)



The Trees in My Forest
Bernd Heinrich (1997) 239pages

Off and on I've lived in forests for most of my life, and I've now owned the forest we will explore in this book for twenty years. I see it through the eyes of a scientist, an "owner," and a caretaker. I have also used it as my laboratory and classroom. Numerous scientific papers and a few books have resulted from my time in this forest. Over the years, my University of Vermont students have studied squirrel activities, fungal and lichen diversity, tree identification, rodent and shrew populations, animal tracking, overwintering insects, browse preferences of moose and hare, and tree regeneration. I have here studied bumblebee foraging, butterfly and wasp thermoregulation, chickadee's search patterns, raven sociobiology, owl behavior, and tree geometry. I have made many of my best friends in this forest - fellowship born of pleasant time spent wandering its paths and exploring its mysteries together. I have watched this forest change with the seasons and over years. Watched trees sprout, grow, die... Contemplated the long history of human habitation and wondered about its future. The forest of Adasm Hill has been my intimate companion and this book, in a sense, is its biography. - from the author's Introduction (Harper Perennial)



The Unexpected Universe
Loren Eiseley (1969) 239pages

Drawn from his long experience as a naturalist, Dr. Eiseley uses the unifying theme of desolation and renewal to respond to the unexpected and symbolic aspects of a wide spectrum of phenomena throughout the universe. Scrupulous scholarship, magical prose, and an intensely rich brooding on the nature of life are all brought to bear on such diverse topics as seeds, the heiroglyphs on shells, lost tombs, the goddess Circe, city dumps, and Neanderthal man. (Harcourt Brace)


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