An Orchard Invisible

"The story of seeds, in a nutshell, is a tale of evolution. From the tiny sesame that we sprinkle on our bagels to the forty-five-pound double coconut borne by the coco de mer tree, seeds are a perpetual reminder of the complexity and diversity of life on earth. How and why do some lie dormant for years on end? How did seeds evolve? The wide variety of uses that humans have developed for seeds of all sorts also receives a fascinating look, studded with examples, including foods, oils, perfumes, and pharmaceuticals."--Global Books in Print.

Inspiring and practical, this is a lovely resource for anyone looking to grow fruit trees or start an orchard, whether in your garden or as a community project. For centuries, orchards have been a compelling and important part of our landscape. The sight of a fruit tree, blushing in blossom in the spring, and then laden with fresh fruit in the summer and autumn, can be truly enchanting, inspiring folklore and art. Not only do orchards provide bountiful fruit for families and communities, they are also attractive to pollinators such as bees, and make a wonderful habitat for birds. There are many ways of incorporating orchard living into your lifestyle, no matter how busy or short of space you are. Written by esteemed horticulturalist Naomi Slade, this gloriously illustrated resource illuminates the possibilities and enables you to make it a reality – whether you have a few fruit trees already or have always wanted an orchard of your own. An Orchard Odyssey shows you how to plant and care for your trees and suggests fruit trees suitable for different spaces. It also covers the benefits of orchard for conservation and biodiversity, orchard heritage, and the role of fruit trees in garden and landscape design. The guide promotes the 'five trees' principle of orchards, and encourages the reader to embrace the orchards in a way that is personal to them. Packed with practical ideas and inspiration, let this delightful book encourage you to re-engage with tree fruit in new ways: look at it the right way and everyone can have an orchard.

Ivy Jacob's ever-disappointed mother and stern father react badly to news of her teen pregnancy, prompting her to run away from her tony Boston home for Western Massachusetts, where she's embraced by a group called The Community. There, she gives birth to her daughter, Mia, and marries the group's charismatic but controlling leader, Joel, when Mia is three months old. The Community's rules are draconian--members are branded with letters corresponding to their alleged crimes--and eventually the abuse weighs on Ivy's conscience. At 16, Mia secretly takes out books from a nearby library (education and reading are forbidden after members turn 15), and she tries to convince her mother to join her in an escape.

What do eggs, flour, and milk have in common? They form the basis of crepes of course, but they also each have an evolutionary purpose. Eggs, seeds (from which flour is derived by grinding) and milk are each designed by evolution to nourish offspring. Everything we eat has an evolutionary history. Grocery shelves and restaurant menus are bounteous evidence of evolution at work, though the label on the poultry will not remind us of this with a Jurassic sell-by date, nor will the signs in the produce aisle betray the fact that corn has a 5,000 year history of artificial selection by pre-Colombian Americans. Any shopping list, each recipe, every menu and all ingredients can be used to create culinary and gastronomic magic, but can also each tell a story about natural selection, and its influence on our plates--and palates. Join in for multiple courses, for a tour of evolutionary gastronomy that helps us understand the shape of our diets, and the trajectories of the foods that have been central to them over centuries--from spirits to spices. This literary repast also looks at the science of our interaction with foods and cooking--the sights, the smells, the tastes. The menu has its eclectic components, just as any chef is entitled. But while it is not a comprehensive work which might risk gluttony, this is more than an amuse bouche, and will leave every reader hungry for more.

Jonathan Silvertown here explores the astonishing diversity of plant life in regions as spectacular as the verdant climes of Japan, the lush grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the shallow wetlands and teeming freshwaters of Florida, the tropical rainforests of southeast Mexico, and the Canary Islands archipelago, whose evolutionary n...

The joyful premise at the heart of this book is that there is a table lavishly spread for all who hunger for forgiveness--the believer, the doubter, and the famished. The book's journey begins and ends with this assertion: not only is there a table of forgiveness set for us in the many wildernesses of life, there is a seat waiting for each and every one of us at that table. What matters is whether we take that seat and, if so, how we behave at the feast. Rooted in the notion of journeying, of setting out each day to discover some new vista along the many paths to the banquet hall of forgiveness, A Table in the Wilderness draws upon the wisdom of multiple religious traditions, as well as non-religious sources, in order to gain perspective on this long misunderstood subject. Readers are just as likely to encounter Dr. Seuss as they are to read the words of Sri Ramakrishna or Saint Augustine along the way. Anyone who has ever been hurt or has hurt another will find this book a helpful guide.

Profound essays that cut through the messiness of life to help you get the good from the bad—by famed therapist Phil Stutz, the New York Times bestselling co-author of The Tools and subject of the Netflix documentary Stutz “Is there another way? Can you live life with its conflicts, uncertainties, and disappointments and somehow feel good about yourself? You can. But it requires a completely new orientation.” There are issues, and there are issues—love, loss, success, failure, hope, regret, life, death. How can we even begin to think clearly about dilemmas so universally confounding? Phil Stutz has spent his life pondering the big challenges that we all face, and this profound book puts the conclusions he’s reached at your fingertips. Stutz has been writing these remarkably insightful short essays since the late 1990s, which are collected here for the first time, along with new insights specific to the unique challenges of today. Each one will change the way you think, but taken all together, this book becomes something far more than the sum of its parts: a compendium of human experience and knowledge that will reframe your worldview. There are hard truths here—the acknowledgment that life is full of pain and not a single one of us is special enough to escape it—but we need to understand and accept them in order to realize our full potential. While The Tools explains the general concepts and five specific practices that Stutz employs in treatment, Lessons for Living addresses real-world circumstances, such as the needs of children, rising above envy, defeating your bad habits, the positive side of anger, and facing insecurities, offering a new way to think about life itself.

Spanning the period from Elizabeth I's reign to Charles II's restoration, this study argues the garden is a primary site evincing a progressive narrative of change, a narrative that looks to the Edenic as obtainable ideal in court politics, economic prosperity, and national identity in early modern England. In the first part of the study, Amy L. Tigner traces the conceptual forms that the paradise imaginary takes in works by Gascoigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare, all of whom depict the garden as a space in which to imagine the national body of England and the gendered body of the monarch. In the concluding chapters, she discusses the function of gardens in the literary works by Jonson, an anonymous masque playwright, and Milton, the herbals of John Gerard and John Parkinson, and the tract writing of Ralph Austen, Lawrence Beal, and Walter Blithe. In these texts, the paradise imaginary is less about the body politic of the monarch and more about colonial pursuits and pressing environmental issues. As Tigner identifies, during this period literary representations of gardens become potent discursive models that both inspire constructions of their aesthetic principles and reflect innovations in horticulture and garden technology. Further, the development of the botanical garden ushers in a new world of science and exploration. With the importation of a new world of plants, the garden emerges as a locus of scientific study: hybridization, medical investigation, and the proliferation of new ornamentals and aliments. In this way, the garden functions as a means to understand and possess the rapidly expanding globe.