A book that debunks the popular myth that William Wordsworth was, first and foremost, a poet of daffodils, Wordsworth's Gardens and Flowers: The Spirit of Paradise provides a vivid account of Wordsworth as a gardening poet who not only wrote about gardens and flowers but also designed - and physically worked in - his gardens. Wordsworth's Gardens and Flowers: The Spirit of Paradise is a book of two halves. The first section focuses on the gardens that Wordsworth made at Grasmere and Rydal in the English Lake District, and also in Leicestershire, at Coleorton. The gardens are explored via his poetry and prose and the journals of his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth. In the second half of the book, the reader learns more of Wordsworth's use of flowers in his poetry, exploring the vital importance of British flowers and other 'unassuming things' to his work, as well as their wider cultural, religious and political meaning. Throughout, the engaging, accessible text is woven around illustrations that bring Wordsworth's gardens and flowers to life, including rare botanical prints, many reproduced here for the first time in several decades.

Following on from Dinosaur Art, this new volume showcases 10 amazing artists whose work represents the cutting edge of paleoart. Many are rising stars in the field; others have embraced digital technology and continue to assert long-standing reputations as leaders in the discipline. This volume also includes state-of-the-art modellers, allowing the reader to explore restoring prehistoric animals in three as well as two dimensions. All accompanied by insights into the cutting of paleontological researcher and the very latest discoveries, with commentaries by respected scientists at the top of their fields.

A brief movement after death by Caleb Cain Marcus explores the release of energy from the body into the universe when we die. The images were taken along the coasts of New York and California and contain sky and ocean-immense bodies of space that we can lose ourselves in; becoming part of their vastness. The inspiration for the book came to the photographer from a personal experience. With the birth of his daughter, his death suddenly felt very near. His childhood questions about what happens when we die resurfaced and Marcus began to think about how to visually represent what occurs after death. The work represents the starting point of his new practice that juxtaposes digital and hand-applied mediums to create a hybrid surface, color and edge that challenges the medium of a photograph and the way in which it is seen, understood and felt. With the motion of a pendulum the grease pencil is swung by a string to make tightly grouped marks that reference the finite quantity of time in a lifespan and that move across the paper as if in a formation of light leaving the earth.

Where the windswept Patagonian steppe meets the Andes, and the massive unclimbed south wall of Cerro San Lorenzo looks down on the Lacteo Valley: Perito Moreno National Park is a stronghold of wild nature. In a region so alluring that is has become synonymous with beauty at the end of the Earth, Perito Moreno National Park is an icon of Patagonia. Named in honor of revered early conservationist Perito Moreno, the "John Muir of Argentina," this relatively little visited park is a magnet for intrepid travelers and ambitious alpinists. Legendary businessman and philanthropist Douglas Tompkins (founder of The North Face) contributes the book's foreword. In a book as grand as the natural area it celebrates, "Perito Moreno National Park" presents a stunning collection of images of the park by renowned landscape photographer Antonio Vizcaino. With supporting essays from experts on the park's natural and cultural history, this elegant volume offers an armchair tour of one of the world's most scenic and unsullied landscapes. For all of who dream of Patagonia, "Perito Moreno National Park" is a ticket into the heart of the wild.

This is a fascinating volume that uses illustrated manuscripts to gain a unique insight into the gardens of the Renaissance. Whether part of a grand villa or an extension of a common kitchen, gardens in the Renaissance were planted and treasured in all reaches of society. Illuminated manuscripts of the period offer a glimpse into how people at the time pictured, used, and enjoyed these idyllic green spaces. Drawn from a wide range of works in the Getty Museum's permanent collection, this gorgeously illustrated volume explores gardens on many levels, from the literary Garden of Love and the biblical Garden of Eden to courtly gardens of the nobility, and reports on the many activities - both reputable and scandalous - that took place there.

Ambiguity Revisited is concerned with the manner in which pictures communicate with the spectator. Its focus lies in those fluid, indeterminate spaces where our reading of images, in art and photography, exercises and draws upon our imagination, memory, and experience. Sir William Empsons seminal (1930) text: Seven Types of Ambiguity is used as a springboard to discussion, towards a fresh way of exploring ambiguity beyond English literature, and in a broader framework to that contained in John Bergers (1989) Another Way of Telling. The use of ambiguity in art and photography, as in literature, is both a conscious and an unconscious act; and ambiguity influences the way in which we respond to work, from Leonardo da Vincis portraits to the photographer William Egglestons engaging and idiosyncratic reflections on Americas Deep South. This ambiguity is a force for good, or at least one to be reckoned with, due to its participatory nature in actively engaging with, or masking itself from, the viewer. Ambiguity is infrequently discussed but is highly relevant as an expressive device. It holds a position at the core of communication within the visual arts. As society becomes influenced increasingly by communications delivered in a visual form, so we, the consumers, require tools, more than ever, to engage with the work.

Animals and Artists discusses a selection of modern and contemporary artworks that challenge traditional representations of nonhuman animals, and that expose human viewers to animal otherness. It argues that the individuated and discrete human self in possession of consciousness, rationality, empathy, a voice, and a face, is open to challenge by nonhuman capacities such as distributed cognition, gender ambiguity, metamorphosis, mimicry and avian speech. In traditional philosophy, animals represent all that is lacking in humankind. However, Animals and Artists argues that just because humans frame 'the animal' as a negative term, their binary opposite and everything that they are not, does not mean that animals have no meaning in themselves. Rather, animals in their very unknowability, mark the limits of human thinking. By combining art analysis with poststructuralist, post humanist and animal studies theories as well as scientific research, Elizabeth decentres the human and establishes a new position where differences are embraced. In our current moment of ecological crisis, Animals and Artists brings readers into solidarity with other animal species, among them spiders, silkworms, bees, parrots and octopuses. The book raises empathy for other live forms, drawing attention to the shared vulnerabilities of human and nonhuman animals, and in so doing underlines the power of art to bring about social change. Readers will include animal studies scholars, artists, art historians, Jean Painleve scholars, Surrealist enthusiasts, non-academics who are concerned about the human-animal relationship, the environment or larger identity politics issues.