Following the popular BBC series, this book is the comprehensive guide to one of Europe's largest and most ambitious gardening projects, the magnificent RHS Bridgewater.
RHS Garden Bridgewater has a rich history, deeply entrenched personal connections with the local community and now a dazzling and exciting future, all of which is brought to life in this sumptuous book.
Set on the site of the former Worsley New Hall stately home in Manchester, bordering the Bridgewater canal, the Bridgewater garden is one of the most exciting public garden projects undertaken anywhere in the world in recent years. Guided by a masterplan from the renowned landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith, it is a showpiece of horticultural excellence with a rich array of attractions, from walled gardens and Chinese streamside features to aromatic kitchen gardens and verdant wooded areas, all placed at the heart of the community.
RHS Garden Bridgewater charts the glory years of royal visits to the site, the decline and fall into disrepair and the subsequent restoration and development of the gardens into what they are today.
Chronicling personal memories from the people who shaped the gardens, the book is beautifully illustrated and provides a complete insight into how a garden was and will once again become an integral and inspirational part of the community.
THE PERFECT COMPANION TO PETER MAY'S LEWIS TRILOGY, AND A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THROUGH THE HEBRIDEAN ISLANDS. The landscape of the Outer Hebrides, with its stark cliffs, ghostly mists and lonely beaches, has become a definitive character of Peter May's Lewis trilogy. In Hebrides , readers will accompany him on an odyssey in prose and images, through a history of the Vikings' 'Long Island' and his own deep personal connection with the islands that influenced his bestselling work. Travelling as if alongside his protagonist Fin Macleod, he describes the island life - as bewitching as it is treacherous - his encounter with the bird-hunters of Sula Sgeir, the savage seas of Ness and the churches of Eriskay. With extracts from the trilogy and specially commissioned photographs, this book places his writing and characters within the land that gave them form. Couldn't get enough of the Lewis trilogy and its extraordinary setting? Check out Peter May's latest bestseller, Coffin Road , in which the million-selling master of crime brings murder back to the Outer Hebrides.
A dazzlingly original, lyrical and epic encounter with the Earth as it used to bebr>br>What would it be like to visit the ancient landscapes of the past? To experience the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among these other lands, as creatures extinct for millions of years roam? In this mesmerizing debut, the award-winning palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant.br>br>Journeying backwards in time from the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself, and across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in a series of extinct ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist''s eye for detail and drama. Yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle''s shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in fact. We visit the birthplace of humanity in Pliocene-era Kenya; in the Jurassic, we wander among dinosaur-inhabited islands in the Mediterranean; and we gaze at the light of an enormous moon in the Ediacaran sky, when life hasn''t yet reached land.br>br>Otherlands is a naturalist''s travel guide, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space, showing us the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fantastical and familiar.>
Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond, the author discovers a lost world - a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts.
'Chappell is a gifted storyteller' - Observer In 2015 Emily Chappell embarked on a formidable new bike race: The Transcontinental. 4,000km across Europe, unassisted, in the shortest time possible. On her first attempt she made it only halfway, waking up suddenly on her back in a field, floored by the physical and mental exertion. A year later she entered the race again - and won. Where There's a Will takes us into Emily Chappell's race, grinding up mountain passes and charging down the other side; snatching twenty minutes' sleep on the outskirts of a village before jumping back on the bike to surge ahead for another day; feeding in bursts and navigating on the go. We experience the crippling self-doubt of the ultra distance racer, the confusing intensity of winning and the desperation of losing a dear friend who understood all of this.
Animals don''t exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights , a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches. Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century''s greatest nature writers. **CHOSEN AS A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK TO WATCH OUT FOR IN 2020 AND A NEW STATESMAN BOOK TO READ IN 2020**
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 'Affectionate, evocative, illuminating. A story of survival - of a flock, a landscape and a disappearing way of life. I love this book' Nigel Slater 'Triumphant, a pastoral for the 21st century' Helen Davies, Sunday Times, Books of the Year 'The nature publishing sensation of the year, unsentimental yet luminous' Melissa Harrison, The Times, Books of the Year Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations. Their way of life is ordered by the seasons and the work they demand, and has been for hundreds of years. A Viking would understand the work they do: sending the sheep to the fells in the summer and making the hay; the autumn fairs where the flocks are replenished; the gruelling toil of winter when the sheep must be kept alive, and the light-headedness that comes with spring, as the lambs are born and the sheep get ready to return to the fells.
Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves.
From the internationally acclaimed author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved pieces, along with new essays on topics and stories ranging from nostalgia and science fiction to the true account of a refugee's flight to the UK. Her pieces ranges from accounts of swan upping on the Thames to watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary to seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, what we do when we watch wildlife and why.
This is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us, by one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers.
