The Natural Year

Wendyl's story of living the simple life in the country: gardening, foraging, fishing and the freedom she has found in ageing. Beautifully illustrated and including 100 new and delicious recipes. 'An absolute cracker of a guide to feeling content by living more naturally.' Lynda Hallinan 'The book that saved me from peak Covid-19 anxiety. It felt like a portal. I'd open at a random page and lose myself in a timeless green swoon.' Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff A Natural Year follows writer Wendyl Nissen's life in the peaceful New Zealand countryside over one year. It's the story of what happens in her garden, her kitchen and her life over twelve months, and the thoughts inspired by each passing season. She writes about the freedom that she has found in ageing and the joy that comes along with it. She addresses her depression, anxiety and the mental well-being she's gained from her back-to-basics lifestyle and the practical things she does to live in a sustainable, natural way. With photographs taken at her home in Northland, Wendyl shares 100 new recipes, including how to make yeast from grapes, yoghurt using chilli stalks and many others she has discovered. In a world which can be full of stress and confusion, A Natural Year is a guide to a simpler, less complicated life.

This guide reveals how we can gain renewed energy and health by recognising that as living creatures we are governed by seasonal highs and lows. It offers guidance on diet, exercise and issues you might address in your personal and professional life.

In A Natural Year, critically acclaimed travel writer Michael Fewer celebrates the everyday wonder of Irish nature in these beautifully written diaries, observed from his homes in south Dublin and rural Waterford, in which he delights at the startling beauty and extraordinary complexity of the natural world through the tranquil rhythms of the passing seasons. Fewer’s infectious passion for his subject simply inspires our own observation, and suggests how careful study of the natural world around us can be a sure antidote to the stresses of modern life. At a time when it’s essential for us to understand the crisis that faces our wildlife and environment, we need to know more about the natural world around us, the treasures that are being needlessly lost, and the threat to our very way of life. A Natural Year will open eyes and hearts to a greater understanding of the world around us, and its innate beauty and fragility.

Advising not only where to go but when to go, Weidensaul takes readers on a first-person tour to view the natural events of every month in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. Photos and illustrations.

Join field biologist Richard MacDonald on a year-long journey to document the birds of Acadia National Park and Downeast Maine. As you read this book, you'll feel as though you are sitting in Richard's living room as he shares his adventures in an easy-to-read story-telling style. With each bird, he relates finding the species while weaving in fun facts and stories from his 40+ years of study, birding, and travel from Newfoundland to Antarctica. Richard relates his introduction to birds through banding ducks as a ten-year-old. The year is bookended with Black-capped Chickadees on a New Year's Day Schoodic Christmas Bird Count and at the end with Boreal Chickadees. You will go out on research vessels into the Gulf of Maine to look for seabirds, hike the mountains of Acadia to observe Snowy Owls, take a night-time bicycle ride into Great Pond Mountain Wildlands to look for the rare Chuck-will's-widow, and view shorebirds from the cockpit of a sea kayak. Through it all, you feel as though you are right there with him. Although the book is about birds, it is not just for birders. Anyone with an interest in nature should read this book.

An exhilarating journey of natural renewal through a year with MacArthur fellow Carl Safina Beginning in his kayak in his home waters of eastern Long Island, Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point takes us through the four seasons to the four points of the compass, from the high Arctic south to Antarctica, across the warm belly of the tropics from the Caribbean to the west Pacific, then home again. We meet Eskimos whose way of life is melting away, explore a secret global seed vault hidden above the Arctic Circle, investigate dilemmas facing foraging bears and breeding penguins, and sail to formerly devastated reefs that are resurrecting as fish graze the corals algae-free. "Each time science tightens a coil in the slack of our understanding," Safina writes, "it elaborates its fundamental discovery: connection." He shows how problems of the environment drive very real matters of human justice, well-being, and our prospects for peace. In Safina's hands, nature's continuous renewal points toward our future. His lively stories grant new insights into how our world is changing, and what our response ought to be.

"When it sings, a garden will have the power to transport and to lead you to a place that is magical. It is an oasis for creation, available to anyone with a little space and the compunction to get their hands dirty." In Natural Selection, Dan Pearson draws on ten years of his Observer columns to explore the rhythms and pleasures of a year in the garden. Travelling between his city-bound plot in Peckham and twenty acres of rolling hillside in Somerset, he celebrates the beautiful skeletons of the winter garden, the joyous passage into spring, the heady smell of summer's bud break and the flaring of colour in autumn. Pearson's irresistible enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge overflow in a book teeming with tips to inspire your own space, be it a city window box or country field. Bringing you a newfound appreciation of nature, both wild and tamed, reading Natural Selection is a deeply restorative experience.

This is a book about heroism - of sorts. Roy Hobbs has an immense natural gift for playing baseball. He could become one of the great ones of the game, a player unmatched in his time - a hero. But his first hard-won big chance ends violently, at the hands of a crazy girl, and then it is years before he gets another shot. At last, in a few short seasons, or never, he must achieve the towering reputation that he feels is his right.

Informal instructions on foraging for wild food, gardening, preserving, bread baking and winemaking.

Uncover the bountiful secrets of Florida's wildlife and landscape in this month-by-month guide to natural events in this popular state. Also included are natural sites and events on the Georgia and Alabama coasts. Maps. Illustrations.