Posted inWords
Bittersweet: reflections on ‘home’
Do you want to go home?’ my partner asks. By ‘home’ she doesn’t mean heading back to the house after a trip out, as we are already there, sitting on…
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Finding The Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
The Yucatan jungle is on either side of the road as I finish reading Finding the Mother Tree. Throughout my four-hour journey through the Mexican south, I’ve been idly looking…
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A Winter Walk Around St Ives
My eyes lighted on something dark, in the distance, on the beach. Coming closer, I saw it was a dead porpoise. Mouth frozen in a smile, skin radiating a silvery…
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Aurochs and Auks: Essays on Mortality and Extinction by John Burnside
This book is not an easy read. This is probably as it should be, given the subject material – the death of the individuals, species and the planet, and the…
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The Ghost in the Garden by Jude Piesse
In her wonderful book, The Ghost in the Garden: in Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden, author Jude Piesse observes that gardens have the unique distinction of being created by people as…
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Deliverance
For days there had been no signs of human life. Pine forests shrouded in snow and half-frozen lakes glittering in the sun stretched into an unspoilt Canadian wilderness. It was…
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Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes
In Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he remarks that the permanence of a mountain seems to structure our understanding of the natural world, thereby conditioning the eye…
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The Five Acre Forest
Everyone has their own idea of home, and what home entails, for Trish Nicholson that idea came to the realisation on a sand dune in New Zealand, thus buying and…
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The White Birch
Edgelands, not the ones where concrete and vegetation intersect, but the ones where culture and nature face each other in the mirror. A major thread in Tom Jeffrey’s new book,…
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Light Rains Sometimes Fall
One of the many things that have amazed me in the world is traditional Japanese art and architecture, I’ve always been fascinated by how intertwined buildings and bridges have become…