Home Ground

Published to great acclaim in 2006, the hardcover edition of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape met with outstanding reviews and strong sales, going into three printings. A language-lover's dream, Home Ground revitalized a descriptive language for the American landscape by combining geography, literature, and folklore in one volume. Now in paperback, this visionary reference is available to an entire new segment of readers. Home Ground brings together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. The writers draw from careful research and their own distinctive stylistic, personal, and regional diversity to portray in bright, precise prose the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit. Home Ground includes 100 black-and-white line drawings by Molly O’Halloran and an introductory essay by Barry Lopez.

Like John Muir, David Pitt-Brooke stepped out for a walk one morning—a long walk of a thousand kilometres or more through the arid valleys of southern interior British Columbia. He went in search of beauty and lost grace in a landscape that has seen decades of development and upheaval. In Crossing Home Ground he reports back, providing a day-by-day account of his journey’s experiences, from the practical challenges—dealing with blisters, rain and dehydration—to sublime moments of discovery and reconnection with the natural world. Through the course of this journey, Pitt-Brooke’s encounters with the natural world generate starting points for reflections on larger issues: the delicate interconnections of a healthy landscape and, most especially, the increasingly fragile bond between human beings and their home-places. There is no escaping the impact of human beings on the natural world, not even in the most remote countryside, but he finds hope and consolation in surviving pockets of loveliness, the kindness of strangers and the transformative process of the walking itself, a personal pilgrimage across home ground. Crossing Home Ground is a book that, though rooted in one specific place and time, will evoke a universal sense of recognition in a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to hikers, natural-history enthusiasts and anyone who loves the wild countryside and is concerned about the disappearance of Canada’s natural spaces. Pitt-Brooke’s grassland odyssey is sure to become a classic of British Columbia nature writing.

Ten years ago Dan Pearson found an extremely rare, large, neglected city plot and set out to design and create a garden space all of his own. Arranged by seasons, Dan shares the challenges of gardening his city plot in a romantic and beautifully written series of diary-like essays, documenting the horticultural tasks required and sharing his successes and failures on the way. Written and photographed in 'real time' this book documents an urban garden and gardener at work, bringing the experience of gardening to life and offering a unique insight into the work and thoughts of the one of the world's most respected garden designers.

How to create flour at home. The many benefits of home flour milling include taste and flavor and the appeal of making a healthy food that tastes good and is seriously nutritous. Home ground flour milling can also save countless dollars just in the cost of bread alone, especially for those with special dietary needs and restrictions, and improved health leads to reduced medical costs. This comprehensive how-to details the whole process behind home flour milling with features such as: The history of whole grains and grain anatomy Benefits of commercially milled flour vs home milled flour Tools and equipment for home flour milling Baking basics including mixing methods and techniques -- the importance of gluten and moisture Going with the grains -- a thorough description of grains such as barley, rye, kamut and buckwheat Nut flours such as almond Baking with freshly milled grains. There are also 100 recipes for tasty quick breads, rolls and buns, muffins, pancakes, coffee cakes, biscuit and scones, cookies, brownies and pastries, plus others that are gluten-free, dairy-free and vegan. The Home Ground Flour Book is ideal for anyone who wants to create their own flours.

Home Ground is a powerful and enduring collection of new writing from established authors, learners, students and tutors who have worked together in Glasgow. The stories and poems in this book are peppered with the landmarks, spaces and places that are emblems of our city. Most of all, they are about people; their hopes and fears, and their trials and triumphs.

The essence of 'Home Ground' is a collection of twenty walks, ranging from about five to fifteen miles in length, situated in the North West of England. The criterion for selection is that each walk must be situated in whole or in part on Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 'Landranger' map no. 103 (Blackburn and Burnley). This was the map used by the author when he first began to explore the area almost fifty years ago, and these long personal associations, heightened by a long absence from the area, make this truly his home ground. Within this relatively small area there is a rich variety of beautiful scenery, largely unsung, all lying within some twenty miles of industrial East Lancashire. From the suburbs of Blackburn to the fringe of the Yorkshire Dales, from the sweeping fells of the Forest of Bowland to the wooded valleys and heights of Calderdale, these walks have something to offer to walkers of practically all tastes. Both the Forest of Bowland and the Pennine Way feature strongly on the map and in the book, and extra sections discuss these features. Especially the Forest of Bowland, recognized as an area of outstanding national beauty but not a national park, is introduced in some detail as its charm and many opportunities for the walker and day visitor are still little known. The Pennine Way, which features in three of the walks, is mentioned more autobiographically as the author recalls his own experience of the Way and its wider relationship to Northern England. About the Author Andrew Stachulski was born in Blackburn in 1950, the son of a Polish father and English mother, and grew up in nearby Great Harwood. He was educated at Accrington Grammar School from 1961 to 1968, when he gained entrance to read Natural Sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He graduated with firstclass honours in 1971 and, after winning a senior scholarship, he remained at the college to study for a Ph. D. under the supervision of Professor Alan (now Sir Alan) Battersby. Following the completion of his doctorate in 1974, he held postdoctoral fellowships with the Medical Research Council and at Jesus College, Oxford until 1978. There followed a long period of employment in the chemical industry, first with Beecham Pharmaceuticals (later SmithKline Beecham) and then Ultrafine Chemicals, Manchester. In 2001 he fulfilled a longheld ambition by returning to academic life at the University of Liverpool, becoming a senior lecturer in 2003. Recently (Jan., 2010) he moved to take up a senior research fellowship at the University of Oxford. Walking has always been a great love of his life, beginning in the Ribble Valley and Pendle country of his native Lancashire. In the mid 1970s he completed a number of Britain's longdistance footpaths, the Pennine Way, Offa's Dyke Path and Coast to Coast walk, accompanied by college friends. Subsequently he climbed all the principal fells of the Lake District, where he often returns, and from 1981 again with a college friend he began to climb in the Scottish Highlands. In 2003 he completed the circuit of all the 'Munros', the separate Scottish mountains of 3,000 ft. or greater height. His first walks were planned with the aid of the old one inch to one mile Ordnance Survey map of Blackburn and Burnley, and that is truly his home ground. It was particularly following his return to the North in 1991, then living in Greater Manchester, that this book came to be planned. Old walks familiar from childhood, in the Ribble and Hodder valleys, Pendle country, South Pennines and the Forest of Bowland were revisited and built on, and many new ones were added. From these the twenty walks featured in this book have been selected, walks which appeal personally to the author through their beauty or special associations, or which in his view speak most clearly of the characteristics of the area.

When longtime author Robert Root moves to a small town in southeast Wisconsin, he gets to know his new home by walking the same terrain traveled by three Wisconsin luminaries who were deeply rooted in place—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth. Root walks with Muir at John Muir State Natural Area, with Leopold at the Shack, and with Derleth in Sac Prairie; closer to home, he traverses the Ice Age Trail, often guided by such figures as pioneering scientist Increase Lapham. Along the way, Root investigates the changes to the natural landscape over nearly two centuries, and he chronicles his own transition from someone on unfamiliar terrain to someone secure on his home ground.In prose that is at turns introspective and haunting, Walking Home Ground inspires us to see history’s echo all around us: the parking lot that once was forest; the city that once was glacier. "Perhaps this book is an invitation to walk home ground," Root tells us. "Perhaps, too, it’s a time capsule, a message in a bottle from someone given to looking over his shoulder even as he tries to examine the ground beneath his feet."

The first multi-disciplinary collection of essays to focus exclusively on early Canadian literature with the aim of reassessing the field and proposing new approaches.