season

Chasing Spring

Long Spring cover

For his book review this week Mark has picked Laurence Rose’s soon-to-be-published “The Long Spring; Tracking the Arrival of Spring Through Europe” from Bloomsbury Publishing.

Recording Rose’s adventures arising from his desire to explore “Europe’s remarkable heritage of exceptional places and the wildlife, traditions and people associated with them” he followed the arrival of Spring across the continent from it’s pre-arrival February beginnings in the north of Africa to its eventual appearance in the arctic.

Winter

winter-cover

By most reckonings, winter begins on 21 December – the winter solstice – however in The Well-read Naturalist library, winter arrived on 26 October this year. I speak, of course, not about the season itself, rather about the fourth and completing volume of the quartet of seasonal anthologies edited by Melissa Harrison and published by Elliott & Thompson.

Brilliant! Delightful! Beautiful!

autumn-cover

Brilliant. Thoughtful. Heartening. Reflective. Inspirational. Fortifying. Delightful. Amazing. Gentle. Magical. Enthralling. Transformative. Relaxing. Beautiful. These are only some of the words I have already used in conversations, both in person and virtual, to describe Melissa Harrison’s superb (there’s another…) Autumn: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons.

Prairie Spring

prairie_spring

In the spirit of the great American natural history writer Edwin Way Teale, Pete Dunne’s Prairie Spring chronicles the unfolding of a season in a manner reminiscent of the very best American natural history authors.

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