THE PRETTY NATURAL WORLD BOOKS PAGE: TO KNOW A STARRY NIGHT, gorgeous nighttime photos of the stars & WILD PLANT CULTURE: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities

WILD PLANT CULTURE: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities
JARED ROSENBAUM
New Society Publishers
$39.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Reconnect. Restore. Reciprocate. Repairing landscapes and reconnecting us to the wild plant communities around us.

Integrating restoration practices, foraging, herbalism, rewilding, and permaculture, Wild Plant Culture is a comprehensive guide to the ecological restoration of native edible and medicinal plant communities in Eastern North America.

Blending science, practice, and traditional knowledge, it makes bold connections that are actionable, innovative, and ecologically imperative for repairing both degraded landscapes and our broken cultural relationship with nature. Coverage includes:

Understanding and engaging in mutually beneficial human-plant connections

Techniques for observing the land's existing and potential plant communities

Baseline monitoring, site preparation, seeding, planting, and maintaining restored      areas

Botanical fieldwork restoration stories and examples

Detailed profiles of 209 native plants and their uses

Both a practical guide and an evocative read that will transport you deep into the natural landscape, Wild Plant Culture is an essential toolkit for gardeners, farmers, and ecological restoration practitioners, highlighting the important role humans play in tending and mending native plant communities.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A beautiful idea: Re-wild the forests of the Eastern North American continent. How does one even start, though.

And here it is, an answer to the idea's obstacles.

There's nothing complicated or threatening about the complex project's graphic presentation. It's simple and typographically clean, and the interspersed illustrations are charming and appropriate to the topics Author Rosenbaum presents clearly and lucidly in this book.

There are simple, practical steps outlined for the project of re-wilding the most densely populated part of the continent. The world needs more wild, and re-wilded, places.

What makes me think of Yule gifting when I read and absorb this message is the sheer number of people I myownself know who, if they possessed some guidance on how, would definitely be willing...many even delighted...to join in the on-the-ground struggle to help the Earth our only home heal itself from generations of careless, heedless neglect.

a typical page spread from chapter 3
Below is an example of the eight-page color illustration insert. The croziers, which in the US we call "fiddleheads" from beginning to end, is particularly beautifully framed...and the skillet full of 'em is really well-chosen here!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TO KNOW A STARRY NIGHT
Text by PAUL BOGARD, photos by BEAU ROGERS
University of Nevada Press
$35.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: No matter where we live, what language we speak, or what culture shapes our worldview, there is always the night. The darkness is a reminder of the ebb and flow, of an opportunity to recharge, of the movement of time. But how many of us have taken the time to truly know a starry night? To really know it.

Combining the lyrical writing of Paul Bogard with the stunning night-sky photography of Beau Rogers, To Know a Starry Night explores the powerful experience of being outside under a natural starry sky—how important it is to human life, and how so many people don’t know this experience. As the night sky increasingly becomes flooded with artificial-light pollution, this poignant work helps us reconnect with the natural darkness of night, an experience that now, in our time, is fading from our lives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a very strong chance that, if you're my age or younger, you've never seen a truly dark night sky. If you grew up east of the Mississippi River, it's almost a guarantee. The saddest part of that is the sheer, astonishing vastness of stars. The closest I've come to seeing skies like these:

...was an early 1970s car trip with my oldest sister who was leaving South Texas for California. I went with her and, at more than one point, she stopped the car at night, turned off the car lights, and we stared up at sheerly astoundingly bright skies...not from (in those days) mercury-vapor lights that were common and getting more so on major highways, as we were in the proverbial middle of nowhere, but from stars. Thousands and thousands and thousands of stars, more than I had ever seen before. The night skies I encountered in middle age above Machu Picchu were the only comparably startling revelation to me.

What made Author Bogard present this book of Photographer Beau Rogers's glorious night-time images to us was his increasing awareness that his own daughter, whose company on these night-time ramblings in the American West he treasured, might not have even these places to see the natural condition of darkness again in her lifetime.

Nothing could possibly be sadder than that!

What a loss to Humanity the curse of light pollution is...and how necessary it is to protect what there is left of it.

We're simply not paying enough attention to these losses. There's nothing to replace natural darkness. There's little research into the costs of the loss to the natural world...there's next to none on its impact to us, the polluters. What we lose only starts with the aesthetic awareness of the extent of the beauty around us on the planet.

This absolutely astoundingly gorgeous book is perfect to gift to your photography fan as well as the environmentally aware young person. It's a spectacular creation and worthy of a space on anyone's display shelf, coffee table, or even tablet.