This fully updated special edition of the classic complete guide to the edible species that grow around us includes a new foreword from the author and a plate section with identification guides for all major species. Originally published in 1972, Richard Mabey’s classic foraging guide has never been out of print since. Food for Free is a complete guide to help you safely identify edible species that grow around us, together with detailed field identification notes and recipes. In this stunning 50th anniversary edition, Richard Mabey’s updated text is accompanied by a wealth of practical information on identifying, collecting, cooking and preparing, as well as history and folklore. Informative illustrations of key species by expert botanical artists are included in a colour plate section. Beautifully written and produced in a new, readable format, Food for Free will inspire us to be more self-sufficient and make use of the natural resources around us to enhance our lives.

Flora of North America North of Mexico Volume 28 - Bryophyta, part 2 - includes treatments prepared by 44 authors covering 698 species in 206 genera classified in 48 families. Descriptions for all of the families, genera, and species are provided plus occurrence maps for species are included and 53% of the species are illustrated. Keys are included to aid in the identification of genera in families and species within the genera; an overall key to the 333 genera of mosses known from North America north of Mexico is also included. Volume 28 is the seventeenth volume to be published in the planned 30-volume Flora of North America North of Mexico series. With the publication of Volume 28, plus the earlier appearance of Volume 27 - Bryophyta, part 1 - in 2007, the treatment of mosses for the Flora area is complete. The currently known moss flora has 1402 species in 333 genera classified in 81 families. For the genera, 17 (5%) are endemic to the Flora area and 273 (19.5%) of the species are endemic with 36 (2.6%) of those considered to be of conservation concern.

Experience the joy of discovering the natural world around you with this beautiful pocket guide to British trees, an inspiration and treat designed to enthral all nature lovers. This comprehensive guide to British trees contains some of the finest original tree illustrations ever produced. Covering all tree species commonly found outside the major arboretums, the text highlights the most important things to look for to aid fast and accurate identification, and the illustrations are annotated with essential features. The introduction contains illustrations of the main leaves, buds, and firs you are likely to find, which also provide the starting point for identification by leading you to a 'key' species. Within each tree family there is a list of key species and a guide to the most important features to look for when identifying a particular tree from that family. Individual species are then thoroughly described and a detailed illustration features on the same page. This is the ideal pocket guide for travelling naturalists and tree enthusiasts alike and is an essential addition to every nature lover's bookshelves.

This guide from the experts of Kew Royal Botanical Gardens is filled with tips and advice to help you grow your best vegetable garden ever! In this book Kew's Kitchen Gardener, Helena Dove, combines practical elements with inspiration and beauty to make a comprehensive and informative guide with all you need to know to master theart of growing vegetables. She shows how to grow some of the most popular staple crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, radishes and rocket, and also some more unusual and exciting choices such as oca, tomatillo, seakale and yacon. She gives easy to follow instructions on how to be a successful vegetable gardener, plus 12 exciting projects to try throughout the year including forcing rhubarb, creating an asparagus border and growing in raised beds. From sowing, to planting young plants, to hardening off and harvesting, find out what you need to do and when, to produce the most magnificent harvests. All the advice is underpinned by the expertise and authority of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and illustrated from Kew's world-famous botanical collection. With this book, you wil be able to reap a rich bounty of delicious vegetables from just a few packets of seed and some fertile ground! This book is from the Kew Experts series, in which the top gardeners and botanical scientists from Royal Botanic Kew Gardens offer up advice and information as well as suggesting handy projects on a range of gardening topics. Other titles include: Companion to Medicinal Plants, Guide to Growing Bulbs, Guide to Growing Fruit, Guide to Growing Orchids, Guide to Growing Roses, Guide to Growing Succulents and Cacti, Guide to Growing Trees, Guide to Growing Herbs and Guide to Growing House Plants.

'Breathtakingly beautiful' i 'Tender and wholehearted' Helen Jukes LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES, I and GARDENS ILLUSTRATED When she suddenly finds herself uprooted, heartbroken, grieving and living out of a suitcase in her late twenties, Alice Vincent begins planting seeds. She nurtures pot plants and vines on windowsills and draining boards, filling her many temporary London homes with green. As the months pass, and with each unfurling petal and budding leaf, she begins to come back to life. Mixing memoir, botanical history and biography, Rootbound examines how bringing a little bit of the outside in can help us find our feet in a world spinning far too fast.

Ferdinand Jacob Lindheimer is known as the 'father of Texas botany.' While he was not the first botanist to collect plants for scientific examination in Texas, his collections are credited with helping botanists around the world to understand the nature, extent, and significance of the diversity of plants in the state. In partnership with Asa Gray of Harvard University, Lindheimer spent eight years collecting Texas plants to distribute to a list of paying subscribers - including places like the British Museum, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the Smithsonian Institution. Today, no fewer than 362 plant names are based, at least in part, on Lindheimer collections, and 65 plants have been named in his honor. Lindheimer was a founding settler of New Braunfels, raising his family on the banks of the Comal River while he continued to collect and ship plant specimens. He was 'elected' as the first editor of the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung (still published today as the Herald-Zeitung), and served from 1852 to 1872. He wrote a number of articles for the Zeitung on topics ranging from plants, climate, and agriculture to Texas Indian affairs, optimism, and teaching schoolchildren. In the last year of Lindheimer's life, one of his students worked with him to collect an assortment of his essays and articles from the Zeitung. In 1879, the collection was published as AufsUEtze und Abhandlungen von Ferdinand Lindheimer im Texas (Essays and Articles of Ferdinand Lindheimer in Texas). John E. Williams now offers the first English translation of these essays, which provides valuable insight into the natural and cultural history of Texas.

A glorious celebration of the beauty, diversity, importance and sheer wonder of plants, with exquisite illustrations from the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Plants feed us, clothe us, shelter us, help transport us, and can both intoxicate and cure us. From food staples to exotic and enchanting flowers, plants are essential for the wellbeing of our selves and our planet. Helen and William Bynum are expert guides to the intriguing histories and uses of over 80 key plants. Rich in cultural, historical, botanical and symbolic associations, the plants, from every corner of the globe – both familiar and bizarre – have fascinating stories to tell. Starting with foods that laid the foundations for the development of civilizations, such as wheat, rice and maize, and those that enliven our diet, such as saffron and spices, sections look at plants that have helped to create our material world, including bamboo and the oak, and crops that have made people rich, such as tea, coffee and sugar cane. Many plants have been used medicinally and others, for instance eucalyptus or giant redwoods, have come to epitomize entire landscapes. Some are the objects of obsession, including the tulip, the rose and the lotus, and some are distinctly strange, such as the world’s largest flower, rafflesia, which smells of rotting flesh! For anyone interested in the extraordinary beauty and diversity of flora around us, this stunning book, illustrated with botanical drawings, paintings and artworks will be an inspiration and a delight.

Almost all the books that have been published on plant hunting focus on the so-called 'golden age' that ended with the death of Frank Kingdon Ward in 1958. One might be forgiven for thinking that plant hunting itself came to an end in 1958. On the contrary, there have been more new plant introductions in the past thirty years than ever before. This book tells the stories of the modern-day plant hunters - such pioneering adventurers as Mikinori Ogisu, Dan Hinkley, Roy Lancaster, Ed de Vogel, Lin Yu-Lin, Michael Wickenden and Claire Scobie. The author also examines the search for medicinal plants and the work of scientific institutions, both of which have been largely ignored, and considers such developments as the effect of habitat destruction on plant loss and plant diversity.

We've become used to thinking of plants as things for us to use: as food, tools, resources, or just as an attractive background to our own lives. But it's time to change our minds. New research shows that plants can think, plan - and may even have memories. We share our planet with beings whose potential we have only glimpsed. Featuring the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Susie Orbach and Merlin Sheldrake, This Book is a Plant will be your handbook to the new reality: showing you a pathway to completely reimagine your relationship with a different kind of natural world. Delve into a world of moss and fungi: Sheila Watt-Cloutier transports us to the Arctic spring, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan discovers the pleasures of painting trees, and Rebecca Tamas puts roots down through earth and soil. This Book is a Plant is made from paper: it was once part of a tree. But it's also a seed: the first shoots of a radical new way of seeing the world around you.

This practical pocket guide includes 194 edible fruits, nuts and seeds, flowers, greens and vegetables, herbs, roots, whole plants, fungi, seaweeds and shellfish that you can forage in the UK and Europe.

Each species account includes accurate artworks and concise descriptions outlining essential details to help you identify species in the field, as well as information on where you can find species and helpful tips on how to cook and bake with the food you forage.

The author's introduction offers practical advice on foraging safely and legally and outlines how to prepare and preserve your foraged foods, including making mead and jam, drying herbs, storing mushrooms for later use and how to safely prepare foraged shellfish. The helpful fold-out poster shows common edible species grouped by season and by habitat.

'Treeture Creatures and Flowerbuds' is a delightful series of rhyming stories accompanied by fascinating facts and beautiful illustrations, carefully put together to inspire a love for trees and nature. Each story focuses on a different set of trees and flowers, taking the reader on a journey of discovery as they learn about the characteristics that make each living thing unique and special. When an unsuspecting beech leaf is whisked away on a ball, she learns a lot about the trees and flowers that surround her as she bounces, floats and squelches her way back to her beloved beech tree! The third book in this wonderful series is just as captivating as the first! Beech the Beech Leaf is both educational and enchanting, with bright, beautiful illustrations and fascinating facts to delight and inform its young audience. The story can be complimented by portable Tree and Flower Trail Swatch booklets, which encourage readers to get out and about with Beech and her friends (sold separately).

A photographic celebration of British wildlife and the country way of life. A Year in the Country is a book about the beauty of the British countryside, featuring stunning photography from some of Britain's greatest wildlife photographers. The book will follow the changes in nature throughout the year and revel in the joy of the British countryside. Each season presents its own gifts to the nature lover: from the trumpeting of wild daffodils in spring to the hypnotic dive and twist of starlings gathering over roosting sites in autumn. The majesty of British wildlife is captured in stunning images that evoke a timeless country existence. Part celebration of nature, part nostalgia for a slower pace of life, this book will make a stunning gift. An escape from everyday life, A Year in the Country transports its audience to a world where the sun shines and the grass is always greener.

'It has been hand-planted by Tsarinas and felled by foresters. It has been celebrated by peasants, worshipped by pagans and painted by artists. It has self-seeded across mountains and rivers and train tracks and steppe and right through the ruined modernity of a nuclear fall-out site. And like all symbols, the story of the birch has its share of horrors (white, straight, native, pure: how could it not?). But, maybe in the end, what I'm really in search of is a birch that means nothing: stripped of symbolism, bereft of use-value . . . A birch that is simply a tree in a land that couldn't give a shit.' The birch, genus Betula, is one of the northern hemisphere's most widespread and easily recognisable trees. A pioneer species, the birch is also Russia's unofficial national emblem, and in The White Birch art critic Tom Jeffreys sets out to grapple with the riddle of Russianness through numerous journeys, encounters, histories and artworks that all share one thing in common: the humble birch tree. We visit Catherine the Great's garden follies and Tolstoy's favourite chair; walk through the Chernobyl exclusion zone and among overgrown concrete bunkers in Vladivostok; explore the world of online Russian brides and spend a drunken night in Moscow with art-activists Pussy Riot, all the time questioning the role played by Russia's vastly diverse landscapes in forming and imposing national identity. And vice-versa: how has Russia's dramatically shifting self-image informed the way its people think about nature, land and belonging? Curious, resonant and idiosyncratic, The White Birch is a unique collection of journeys into Russia and among Russian people.

Britain's nature year, from the first flower to the last leaf With a mix of evocative writing, beautiful photographs and facts that are too good to keep to yourself, this book explores 50 magical moments that define our seasons. It's an inspiring guide to connecting with the nature around you and seeing how it changes through the year. There's butterflies, blossom and bluebells. There's foxgloves, flying ants and fungi. There's snow, seedheads and shadows. You'll discover how many miles an hour spring moves, how spiders can heal us and how woodpeckers help to protect sensitive technology. The inspiration behind the book is partly the National Trust's hugely successful 'Blossom Watch' campaign, launched in March 2021. Each year we are encouraged to notice and share when we first see tree blossom, emulating the Japanese tradition of 'Hanami'.

Pennsylvania, a state of diverse geography and geology, is rich in flora. The second edition of The Plants of Pennsylvania identifies the nearly 3,400 species of trees, wildflowers, ferns, grasses, sedges, aquatic plants, and weeds native to or naturalized in the Commonwealth. Retaining the clearly written identification keys and descriptions that made the first edition such an essential reference, this new edition has been reorganized to reflect recent advances in our understanding of plant relationships. Families and genera are listed in a sequence determined by current studies of plant molecular genetics, thus providing new insights for the study of botany. In addition, species have been added to the book as a result of new discoveries. The botanical illustrations of Anna Anisko continue to complement the descriptions and add an element of beauty to the volume. Developed in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Flora Project, and compiled by botanists at the Morris Arboretum, the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the second edition of The Plants of Pennsylvania is the authoritative guide to Pennsylvania's plant life. It will be indispensable to taxonomists, conservationists, ecologists, foresters, land planners, teachers, agricultural county agents, students, and amateur naturalists.

The essential photographic guide to Ireland's wildlife. Collins Complete Irish Wildlife describes almost all the mammals, birds, fish and butterflies of Ireland likely to be encountered by the keen amateur naturalist, as well as all the common and widespread flowers, trees and shrubs. With over 1,000 colour photographs, this comprehensive guide illustrates every species described. The introduction by Ireland's best known wildlife expert, Derek Mooney, sets out where you can find the best of Irish wildlife. Reptiles and amphibians, insects and spiders, molluscs and other invertebrates are also featured, and species are organised taxonomically. Each section is coded with a symbol for quick reference and species are grouped according to natural relationships and similarities. Collins Complete Irish Wildlife is a book no nature lover should travel without.

Trying to understand the wonders and mysteries of the natural world has been a human preoccupation since the earliest times. Myriad myths and legends have subsequently evolved to explain the existence and power of our fertile planet. At the same time, the knowledge of which plants to use as essential foods, remedies, and for construction was of obvious importance, not only to learn but also to pass on and remember. It is therefore hardly surprising that from all corners of the globe a wealth of stories, myths and legends about plants has been passed down to us, gathered together in this fascinating volume. Here you will discover sound principles in some of the traditional advice, and wisdom in many of the observations of the plant world. However there are also highly fanciful superstitions, intriguing tales and amusing anecdotes, which any plant lover will truly relish. Discover which trees are believed to have healing powers? How, in legend, the white rose turn red? Why the lily is a symbol of purity? Any why is it considered unlucky to bring some flowers indoors?

'Kimmerer blends, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet's oldest plants' Guardian 'Bewitching ... a masterwork ... a glittering read in its entirety' Maria Popova, Brainpickings Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. In these interwoven essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. Drawing on her experiences as a scientist, a mother, and a Native American, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as within the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

'Inspirational' Cara Delevingne Whether you live in a house or flat, in a rural or urban environment, this beautiful book shows how to harness the natural world around us and feel more grounded and rooted in our surroundings. The Wild Journal is a beautifully illustrated guide from leading florist and nature writer Willow Crossley. Guiding you through creative practical projects and therapeutic seasonal reflections, The Wild Journal celebrates the potential of nature to mend, heal and transform our mood. The simple, back-to-basics habits and small seasonal changes in the book can help everyone to counteract the unpredictability and chaos of everyday life. Wherever you live, there are simple mindful actions - from listening to birdsong instead of rushing on your commute, to collecting natural treasures such as feathers, branches, pebbles or pine cones. Willow shares her creative techniques for bringing nature into your daily routine - whether it's planting and potting, identifying wild flowers, trying your hand at beautifully simple flower arrangements or making your own essential oils and candles. There is space to record reflections and your favourite seasonal activities, as well as ideas for star-gazing, bird-watching, and so much more. Willow Crossley's creative approach is informed by an artistic eye and a life spent immersed in nature. From growing up in Wales where days were spent exploring outdoors and flowers adorned every surface, to living in France surrounded by fields of sunflowers, iris and fragrant lavender, nature has always been an intrinsic part of her everyday life.

Sasol First Field Guide to Aloes of Southern Africa provides fascinating insight into the aloes of the region.

Full-colour photographs , distribution maps and easy-to-read text will help the budding naturalist to identify the more common aloes found in southern African gardens and landscapes, discover where they occur, and learn about their unique features.