"This is a book about nature and culture", Eric T. Freyfogle writes, "about our place and plight on earth, and the nagging challenges we face in living on it in ways that might endure". Challenges, he says, we are clearly failing to meet. Harking bac...

Leaves are all around us – in backyards, cascading from window boxes, even emerging from small cracks in city sidewalks given the slightest glint of sunlight. Perhaps because they are everywhere, it's easy to overlook the humble leaf, but a close loo...

While there is enormous public interest in biodiversity, food sourcing, and sustainable agriculture, romantic attachments to heirloom seeds and family farms have provoked misleading fantasies of an unrecoverable agrarian past. The reality, as Courtne...

A lyrical tribute to the diversity of trees, their physical beauty, their special characteristics and uses, and their ever-evolving meanings Since the beginnings of history trees have served humankind in countless useful ways, but our relationship wi...

A lavishly illustrated and long-overdue guidebook to the rich natural history of Long Island Sound and its coastlines, a region beloved by millions of people. Long Island Sound consists of a diverse collection of unique marine, estuarine, and terres...

While the influence of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) looms large over the natural sciences, his legacy reaches far beyond the field notebooks of naturalists. Von Humboldt's 1799-1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist...

At the close of the 1970s, the two-domain classification scheme long used by most biologists – prokaryotes versus eukaryotes – was upended by the discovery of an entirely new group of organisms: archaea. Initially thought to be bacteria, these single...

Although plants comprise more than 90% of all visible life, and land plants and algae collectively make up the most morphologically, physiologically, and ecologically diverse group of organisms on earth, books on evolution instead tend to focus on an...

One of humankind's oldest companions, the hawthorn tree, is bound up in the memories of every recorded age and the plot lines of cultures all across the Northern Hemisphere. Hawthorn examines the little-recognized political, cultural, and natural his...

Some of Henry David Thoreau's most beautiful nature writing was inspired by the flowering trees and plants of Concord. An inveterate year-round rambler and journal keeper, he faithfully recorded, dated, and described his sightings of the floating wat...