Outdoor Living & Gardening
Get outside! Plant a garden! Explore nature! But before you go, prepare ahead with some reading on the great outdoors.
Starfinder
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Hardcover
$34.00
Reader Reward Price: $30.60
Planisphere and Starfinder is your personal guide to exploring the night sky. It takes the mystery out of astronomy and introduces basic stargazing techniques, helping you to find and recognize objects easily.
Starting close to home in the Solar System, it shows you how to observe the Moon, planets, comets, and asteroids, as well as how to make the most of events like eclipses and meteor showers. Then, you'll head for the stars with a guide to the constellations.
In this book, you will find:
Facts, charts, timelines, and graphs to help explain core concepts.Month-by-month guides outlining the best times and places to see planets.A planisphere you can remove from the book and take anywhere to see stars on the go.
Each entry is illustrated with a clear star chart, shows you where you can see the constellation in the world, and even explains its star pattern's symbolic meaning. Have you ever heard of Orion's belt? Your guide will ensure you're armed with a list of things to look out for and how best to see them.
Night Magic
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Hardcover
$39.00
Reader Reward Price: $35.10
From a New York Times bestselling nature writer comes a celebration of what goes on outside in the dark, from blooming moon gardens to nocturnal salamanders, from glowing foxfire and synchronous fireflies that blink in unison like an orchestra of light.
In this glorious celebration of the night, New York Times bestselling nature writer Leigh Ann Henion invites us to leave our well-lit homes, step outside, and embrace the dark as a profoundly beautiful part of the world we inhabit. Because no matter where we live, we are surrounded by animals that rise with the moon, and blooms that reveal themselves as light fades. Henion explores her home region of Appalachia, where she attends a synchronous firefly event in Tennessee, a bat outing in Alabama, and a moth festival in Ohio. In North Carolina, she finds forests alight with bioluminescent mushrooms, neighborhood trees full of screech owls, and valleys teeming with migratory salamanders. Along the way, Henion encounters naturalists, biologists, primitive-skills experts, and others who've dedicated their lives to cultivating relationships with darkness.
Every page of this lyrical book feels like an opportunity to ask: How did I not know about this before? For example, we learn that it can take hours, not minutes, for human eyes to reach full night vision capacity. And that there are thousands of firefly species on earth, many with flash patterns as unique as fingerprints. In an age of increasing artificial light, Night Magic focuses on the amazing biodiversity that still surrounds us after sunset. We do not need to stargaze into the distant cosmos or dive into the depths of oceans to find awe in the dark. There are dazzling wonders in our own backyards. And readers of World of Wonders, Entangled Life, and The Hidden Life of Trees will discover joy in Night Magic.
The Serviceberry
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,Hardcover
$25.00
Reader Reward Price: $22.50
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.
As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry's relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth--its abundance of sweet, juicy berries--to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, "Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency."
As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is "a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world." The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that "hoarding won't save us, all flourishing is mutual."
Robin Wall Kimmerer is donating her advance payments from this book as a reciprocal gift, back to the land, for land protection, restoration, and justice.
How to Winter
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Hardcover
$39.00
Reader Reward Price: $35.10
A blend of mindset science, original research, and cultural insights for cultivating a positive "wintertime mindset," to vanquish winter blues and find joy and comfort in dark times year-round.
Do you dread the end of Daylight Saving Time and grouch about the long, chilly season of gray skies and ice? Do you find yourself in a slump every January and February? What if there were a way to rethink this time of year? Psychologist and winter expert Kari Leibowitz's galvanizing HOW TO WINTER uses mindset science to help readers embrace winter as a season to be enjoyed, not endured--and in turn, learn powerful lessons that can impact our mental wellbeing throughout the year.
Kari Leibowitz moved above the Arctic Circle - where the sun doesn't rise for two months each winter -expecting to research the season's negative effects on mental health, only to find that inhabitants actually looked forward to it with delight and enthusiasm. Leibowitz has since travelled to places on earth with some of the coldest, darkest, longest and most intense winters, and discovered the power of "wintertime mindset"-- viewing the season as full of opportunity and wonder. Impactful strategies for cultivating this wintertime mindset can teach us not just about braving the gray, cold months of the year, but also the darker and more difficult seasons of life.
In Tromsø, Norway, people live in rhythm with nature, adapting to the months-long Polar Night by honoring seasonal fluctuations in energy, slowing down, and resting more.On the Isle of Lewis, off the coast of Scotland, communal gatherings around roaring fires embrace darkness and provide connection during long nights.In Yamagata, Japan, families sink into steaming onsen baths, banishing the chill of winter with healthful soaks that improve sleep and reduce risk of heart attack.
Inspired by cutting-edge psychological and behavioral science research as well as cultures worldwide that find warmth and joy in winter's extremes, HOW TO WINTER provides readers with concrete tools for making winter wonderful wherever they live and harnessing the power of small mindset changes with big impact to help readers embrace every season of life.
Atlas Obscura
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, ,Hardcover
$50.00
Reader Reward Price: $45.00
From the bestselling authors of Atlas Obscura and Gastro Obscura comes a nature book like no other--a dazzling, over-the-top collection of the world's most extraordinary wild species that takes you to all seven continents and beyond. It's more than a field guide-it's an adventure.
From the curious minds of Atlas Obscura, authors of #1 New York Times bestselling Atlas Obscura and Gastro Obscura, comes an unputdownable celebration of the world's living wonders. Learn how dung beetles navigate by the stars, and trees communicate through their roots. Meet one of the strongest animals in the world: the puny peacock mantis shrimp. Pay your respects to a 44,000 year old shrub, float along flying rivers, and explore a garbage dump overseen by endangered storks. Examine old examples of bird song notation written on sheet music. Also, first person interviews: hear from a honey hunter and his avian partners, a scientist working to find the world's only ocean-dwelling insects, and an offshore radio DJ who is at the heart of the local fishing community. Featuring over 500 extraordinary plants, animals, and natural phenomena, with illustrations and photos on every page, the book takes readers around the globe--from Antarctic deserts to lush jungles, and into the deepest fathoms of the ocean and the hearts of our densest cities. Teeming with detail and wildly entertaining, Wild Life reinvigorates our sense of wonder, awe and amazement about the incredible creatures we share our planet with.
Ornithography
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Hardcover
$29.99
Reader Reward Price: $26.99
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING ILLUSTRATOR
From the creator of Floriography and the Woodland Wardens Oracle Deck comes this beautifully illustrated exploration of the folklore, mythology, and history surrounding our favorite winged companions.
Birds have inspired us since the dawn of time: their elegance in flight, captivating colors, and delicate mannerisms spark hope, joy, and delight. Cultures around the world have historically looked to birds as sacred messengers, intermediaries between earth and sky, including them in myths and legends and using them to teach moral lessons and historical truths.
In Jessica Roux's Ornithography, each of 100 entries focuses on one bird species, featuring a full-page color illustration in her detailed, darkly romantic style and the lore behind each bird.
The perfect gift for birdwatchers, gardeners, and history buffs, as well as all readers who appreciate nature, mythology, and art, Ornithography is as intriguing and playful as the feathered muses that fill its pages.
Our Green Heart
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Hardcover
$35.00
Reader Reward Price: $31.50
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
In this inspiring culmination of Diana Beresford-Kroeger's life's work as a botanist, biochemist, biologist and poet of the global forest, she delivers a challenge to us all to dig deeper into the science of forests and the ways they will save us from climate breakdown--and then do our part to plant and protect them.
As the last child in Ireland to receive a full Druidic education, Diana Beresford-Kroeger has brought an unusual and ancient holistic attitude to the science of trees, which has led her to many fresh insights into how closely we are tied to one another and to the natural world. Her influential message is to pay rapt attention to trees, because they are the green heart of the living world. Forests are our lungs, our medicine, our oxygen and the renewal of our soil. Planting the right trees in the right places, protecting the last virgin forests and working to create new ones is our best means to ensure a future for our children and grandchildren on this burning earth.
Each of the essays gathered in Our Green Heart show us a slice of the natural world through Diana's unique lens, illuminating the way our health, individually and as a species, is tied to the health of the forest--a tie we ignore at our peril. She maps the science that still needs to be done--there is so much we don't know about the ways trees and forests work--but also, eloquently, shows us the path to survival that her own science has revealed, the "bioplan" or blueprint for the connectivity of life in nature. If we realize that even the flowerpot on our doorstep is a natural habitat, and plant it according to its bioplan, we will be aiding and abetting life rather than destroying it.
Bite
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Hardcover
$40.00
Reader Reward Price: $36.00
From three-inch fang blennies to thirty-foot prehistoric crocodiles, from gaboon vipers to Neanderthals, Bite is a fascinating journey through the natural, scientific, and cultural history of something right in front of--or in--our faces: teeth.
In Bite, zoologist Bill Schutt makes a surprising case: it is teeth that are responsible for the long-term success of vertebrates. The appearance of teeth, roughly half a billion years ago, was an adaptation that allowed animals with backbones, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, dinosaurs and mammals--including us--to chow down in pretty much every conceivable environment.
And it's not just food. Tusks and fangs have played crucial roles as defensive weapons--glimpsing the upper canines of snarling dogs is all it takes to know that teeth are an efficient means of aggression. Vampire bats use their razor-sharp teeth to obtain a widespread but generally untappable resource: blood. Early humans employed their teeth as tools to soften tough fibers and animal hides. Our teeth project information and social status--the ancient Etruscans were the first to wear tooth bling, and it's doubtful that George Washington would have been elected president without the false teeth he wore.
So much of what we know about life on this planet has come from the study of fossilized teeth, which have provided information not only about evolution but also about famine, war, and disease. In his signature witty style, the author of Pump and Cannibalism shows us how our continued understanding of teeth may help us humans through current and future crises, from Alzheimer's disease to mental health issues. Bite is popular science at its best and will appeal to readers of Mary Roach, Merlin Sheldrake, and Ed Yong.
Wise Words From David Attenborough
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Hardcover
$19.99
Reader Reward Price: $17.99
A Book of Quotes
With his unmistakable voice and childlike wonder, Sir David Attenborough has graced our television screens since 1954.
This unauthorised collection celebrates the world's favourite naturalist and his perspective on plants, animals, sustainability, community and beyond.
From vegetarianism to climate change, each of these quotes demonstrates the power of words and positive thinking in our everyday lives.
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'What we do in the next few years will profoundly affect the next few thousand years.'
'We depend upon the natural world for every mouthful of food that we eat and indeed every lungful of air that we breathe.'
'Nature once determined how we survive. Now we determine how nature survives.'
'Movements and ideas can spread at astonishing speed.'
'We need more than just intelligence, we need wisdom.'
Fungal
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Trade paperback
$22.00
Reader Reward Price: $19.80
Fungal is a wide-ranging collection from Ariel Gordon where she explores her fascination with all mushrooms, not just those you can eat. In these engaging essays she takes the reader through ditches and puddles in search of morels, through the hallways of a mushroom factory, down city sidewalks and beside riverbanks as she considers all things found and fungal. Along the way there are entertaining stories of the perils of mushroom identification, including mailed mushrooms that have liquefied, or terrifying thoughts of Canadian geese being fed hallucinogenic mushrooms, as well as a thoughtful analysis of the ways mushrooms knit our ecosystems together and the ways we knit our lives and communities together. Smart, funny and poetic, Gordon moves seamlessly from the natural world to the personal in these essays, examining the interconnectedness of all things and delighting in the rich variety of the world around her.
The Garden Against Time
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Hardcover
$36.99
Reader Reward Price: $33.29
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
The Little Book of Trees
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, ,Hardcover
$20.99
Reader Reward Price: $18.89
A charming, richly illustrated, pocket-size exploration of the world's trees
Packed with surprising facts, this delightful and gorgeously designed book will beguile any nature lover. Expertly written and beautifully illustrated throughout with color photographs and original color artwork, The Little Book of Trees is an accessible and enjoyable mini-reference about the world's trees, with examples drawn from across the globe. It fits an astonishing amount of information in a small package, covering a wide range of topics--from tree anatomy, diversity, and architecture to habitat and conservation. It also includes curious facts and a section on trees in myths, folklore, and modern culture from around the world. The result is an irresistible guide to the amazing lives of trees.
A beautifully designed pocket-size book with a foil-stamped cloth coverFeatures some 140 color illustrations and photosMakes a perfect gift
The Little Book of Spiders
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,Hardcover
$20.99
Reader Reward Price: $18.89
A charming, richly illustrated, pocket-size exploration of the world's spiders
Packed with surprising facts, this delightful and gorgeously designed book will beguile any nature lover. Expertly written and beautifully illustrated throughout with color photographs and original color artwork, The Little Book of Spiders is an accessible and enjoyable mini-reference about the world's spiders, with examples drawn from across the globe. It fits an astonishing amount of information in a small package, covering a wide range of topics--from anatomy, diversity, and reproduction to habitat and conservation. It also includes curious facts and a section on spiders in myths, folklore, and modern culture from around the world. The result is an irresistible guide to the amazing lives of spiders.
A beautifully designed pocket-size book with a foil-stamped cloth coverFeatures some 140 color illustrations and photosMakes a perfect gift
The Little Book of Butterflies
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, ,Hardcover
$20.99
Reader Reward Price: $18.89
A charming, richly illustrated, pocket-size exploration of the world's butterflies
Packed with surprising facts, this delightful and gorgeously designed book will beguile any nature lover. Expertly written and beautifully illustrated throughout with color photographs and original color artwork, The Little Book of Butterflies is an accessible and enjoyable mini-reference about the world's butterflies, with examples drawn from across the globe. It fits an astonishing amount of information in a small package, covering a wide range of topics--from anatomy, diversity, and reproduction to habitat and conservation. It also includes curious facts and a section on butterflies in myths, folklore, and modern culture from around the world. The result is an irresistible guide to the amazing lives of butterflies.
A beautifully designed pocket-size book with a foil-stamped cloth coverFeatures some 140 color illustrations and photosMakes a perfect gift
The Little Book of Beetles
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,Hardcover
$20.99
Reader Reward Price: $18.89
A charming, richly illustrated, pocket-size exploration of the world's beetles
Packed with surprising facts, this delightful and gorgeously designed book will beguile any nature lover. Expertly written and beautifully illustrated throughout with color photographs and original color artwork, The Little Book of Beetles is an accessible and enjoyable mini-reference about the world's beetles, with examples drawn from across the globe. It fits an astonishing amount of information in a small package, covering a wide range of topics--from anatomy, diversity, and reproduction to habitat and conservation. It also includes curious facts and a section on beetles in myths, folklore, and modern culture from around the world. The result is an irresistible guide to the amazing lives of beetles.
A beautifully designed pocket-size book with a foil-stamped cloth coverFeatures some 140 color illustrations and photosMakes a perfect gift
This is a selection of our current Outdoor Living & Gardening titles. To find other titles or authors, or just to browse, please use the search box.