Butterflies Through Binoculars
The East (Butterflies Through Binoculars Series)
by Jeffrey Glassberg

This magnificent field guide is the latest addition to the exciting series that is revolutionizing the way we look at butterflies. Greatly expanding on Butterflies Through Binoculars: The Boston-New York-Washington Region--identified by Defenders of Wildlife Magazine as "the first to focus on netless butterflying" and called " a clear winner" by the Audubon Naturalist--Glassberg here shows us how to find, identify, and enjoy all of the butterflies native to the eastern half of the United States and southeastern Canada. This guide:
*Combines the immediacy and vividness of actual photographs of living butterflies with the traditional field guide format
*Emphasizes conservation over collection
*Includes 630 color photographs, arranged on 72 color plates, of butterflies in the wild
*Provides adjacent color maps that show where each species occurs in a given locality and for how much of the year
*Supplies entirely new field marks for butterfly identification
*Demonstrates how to identify subjects by way of the key characteristics butterflies are likely to display in their natural settings
*Shows how species can be recognized both from above and below
*Explains how to differentiate between males and females.

For butterfly enthusiasts, for bird watchers who want to add a new dimension to their hobby, for anyone who is simply interested in exploring the wilds of their own back yard, this new field guide offers hours of delightful help and instruction.
 

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Defiant Gardens
Making Gardens in Wartime
by Kenneth Helphand

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Gardens that ignored the rules of nature and gardeners who challenged the laws of man are vitally united in Helphand's seminal and revelatory study of life during some of the most lethal conflicts of the twentieth century. From the torturous 475-mile trench line that formed the western front in World War I to the alien landscapes of the Japanese American internment camps in the U.S. during World War II, the sites of unfathomable human brutality also gave rise to acts of uplifting horticultural resistance. Whether they were subsistence vegetable beds improbably tilled beneath barbed wire fences in Nazi-created ghettos or symbolic topiaries artistically carved from brittle desert sagebrush, each audacious example bears solemn testimony to the assertive efforts of determined soldiers, POWs, Holocaust victims, and others to vanquish war's horrors through the spiritually ennobling act of gardening. Helphand's extensively researched history of gardens in wartime illuminates the grotesque juxtaposition of willful devastation and the astonishing tenacity required to create life in the face of death.

Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 

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The Earth Knows My Name
Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America
by Patricia Klindienst

From Booklist
Klindienst celebrates gardens created by immigrants who resisted the intense pressure to assimilate into mainstream American society, in a lyrical account of her three-year journey to collect the stories of ethnic Americans for whom gardening is tantamount to cultural endurance. Survivors of the Pol Pot regime fled the killing fields of Cambodia for the healing fields of New England, while the Yankee inheritor of land wrested generations ago from Native Americans during the infamous Pequot Massacre of 1637 atones for that atrocity through the simple act of sharing seeds of corn with the tribe's descendants. Klindienst profiles 15 valiant and thoughtful gardeners intent on preserving their native birthright and on restoring and protecting their adopted land, individuals and families evincing a stewardship that not only resists cultural absorption but also sustains an ecological imperative. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 

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Fields That Dream
A Journey to the Roots of Our Food
by Jenny Kurzweil (Author)

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 21, 2005
Engaging and informative look at the small farmers who grow and sell their foodstuffs at this city's beloved Farmers Market.

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Florida Butterfly Caterpillars and Their Host Plants
by Marc C. Minno, Jerry F. Butler, and Donald W. Hall  

This book will become the classic guide to southern butterfly caterpillars and their host plants.
With hundreds of color photographs and concise information in a format that can easily be carried into the field, it offers an unprecedented tool for all butterfly gardeners, teachers, naturalists, students, and scientists in the southern United States.

No other book offers such a comprehensive discussion of Florida butterfly caterpillars and their host plants. It covers caterpillar anatomy, biology, ecology, habitat, behavior, and defense, as well as how to find, identify, and raise caterpillars. The book contains sharply detailed photos of 167 species of caterpillars, 185 plants, 18 life cycles, and 19 habitats. It includes 169 maps. Photos of the egg, larva, pupa, and adult of representatives of 18 butterfly families and subfamilies provide life cycle comparisons that have never been illustrated before in such an accessible reference.

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Florida Butterfly Gardening
A Complete Guide to Attracting, Identifying and Enjoying Butterflies
By Marc and Maria Minno

"The first comprehensive guide to butterfly gardening in Florida and adjacent states . . . useful to anybody interested in butterfly gardening in Florida, but it is especially useful, even indispensable, for those who plan their garden to be an educational as well as aesthetic experience."—Mark Deyrup, entomologist, Archbold Biological Station

· presents 400+ color photos taken by the authors, showing every butterfly in adult, larva, and pupa stages
· presents practical information on garden plants, installation, and maintenance
· illustrations of both host and nectar plants
· includes inquiry-based science activities and a Florida butterfly checklist
 

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Forest & Garden
Traces of Wildness in a Modernizing Land, 1897-1949
by Melanie Louise Simo

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote Henry David Thoreau. But how the wild and the managed or artificially arranged environments coexist has been a matter of intense debate among foresters and landscape professionals at least since the era of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.

In Forest and Garden, Melanie L. Simo ranges through a period of landscape history that has been underexamined, between Olmsted and mid-twentieth-century modernism, when the contours of the debate were formed and the landscape professions came of age. Simo's book spans half a century, from the year that Charles Sprague Sargent's influential Garden and Forest magazine ceased publication in 1897 to the appearance in 1949 of two unusual books about land and landscape--Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac and Jens Jensen's The Clearing--that marked the beginning of a new ecological awareness.
 

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Hummingbird Gardens
by Barbara Nielsen (Author), Nancy Newfield (Author), Roger Tory Peterson (Foreword)

From Booklist
An undeniable element of magic surrounds the unexpected discovery of a hummingbird paying a visit to one's own backyard. With that goal in mind, Newfield and Nielsen offer a compilation of material full of sensible advice for gardeners in all parts of the country who share the desire to attract hummingbirds to the home garden environment. Although the guide can be counted on to provide specific recommendations for the best varieties of flowers to plant in order to attract the lovely creatures, the appealing text integrates gardening ideas and designs with an informative introduction to the general habits (migrating and nesting patterns, etc.) of hummingbirds. A final section provides a detailed identification guide to various species and to plants (as designated by regional appropriateness). Alice Joyce --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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In Defense of Food
An Eater's Manifesto
by Michael Pollan (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In his hugely influential treatise The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan traced a direct line between the industrialization of our food supply and the degradation of the environment. His new book takes up where the previous work left off. Examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of health, this powerfully argued, thoroughly researched and elegant manifesto cuts straight to the chase with a maxim that is deceptively simple: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. But as Pollan explains, food in a country that is driven by a thirty-two billion-dollar marketing machine is both a loaded term and, in its purest sense, a holy grail. The first section of his three-part essay refutes the authority of the diet bullies, pointing up the confluence of interests among manufacturers of processed foods, marketers and nutritional scientists—a cabal whose nutritional advice has given rise to a notably unhealthy preoccupation with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily. The second portion vivisects the Western diet, questioning, among other sacred cows, the idea that dietary fat leads to chronic illness. A writer of great subtlety, Pollan doesn't preach to the choir; in fact, rarely does he preach at all, preferring to lets the facts speak for themselves. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 

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Landscaping for Florida's Wildlife
Re-creating Native Ecosystems in Your Yard
by JOSEPH M. SCHAEFER (Author), GEORGE TANNER (Author)

As the natural landscape becomes more humanized, the habitat for many wildlife species has been lost or degraded. In a clear, step-by-step format, this book tells how to create a wildlife-friendly landscape that takes into account both people and nature. The authors' theme--"put back what you don't need"--allows the gardener to reduce maintenance costs while providing a habitat that offers wildlife the essentials of food, cover, water, and space.
*The book addresses such fundamental questions as which ecosystem is appropriate to a particular piece of property and how to determine which species use the property.
*It discusses how to consider soils, drainage patterns, utility lines, adjacent land uses, and existing native vegetation.
*It describes how to prepare a base map; add plant and non-plant elements such as birdhouses, burrows, and tree frog houses; and calculate the cost of materials.
*It tells how to install, maintain, and evaluate the new yard.

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The Rodale Book of Composting
Easy Methods for Every Gardener
by Grace Gershuny (Editor), Deborah L. Martin (Editor)

From Library Journal
This is an update of Jerry Minnich and others' The Rodale Guide to Composting ( LJ 5/1/79), which itself updated J.L. Rodale's Complete Book of Composting (Rodale Pr., 1960. o.p.). The broad spectrum of information given will be useful from backyard urban gardening on up to industrial, municipal, and farm recycling. The first quarter of the book gives you all you ever wanted to know on the science of composting--and more--along with some history. A discussion of materials, methods, structures, equipment, and uses is followed by a brief look at large-scale composting. The writing is an uneven mix of scientific detail and the anecdotal. Chemical reactions are described in exquisite detail, and yet most quotes, while attributed, are neither dated nor their source given. Stu Campbell and Kathleen Bond Borie's Let It Rot: The Gardener's Guide to Composting ( LJ 1/91) is more readable and inviting for the individual gardener. While useful for its in-depth, detailed coverage, Rodale's almost-textbook is recommended only for comprehensive gardening collections.
- Sharon Levin, Univ. of Vermont Lib., Burlington
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 

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Second Nature
A Gardener's Education
by Michael Pollan (Author)

From Library Journal
Pollan, executive editor of Harper's and self-proclaimed amateur gardener, has written a book that is by turns charming and annoying, insightful and shallow, droll and banal. His collection of a dozen essays arranged by season is based on his experiences over a seven-year period in his Connecticut garden, along with vignettes from garden history. Unfortunately, Pollan's text is characterized by dubious and unsupported generalities, self-conscious humor, and extended, labored metaphors, and his lack of gardening authority dooms the book to superficiality. Experienced gardeners and devotees of garden literature will find little here that is original. Only for comprehensive gardening collections.
- Richard Shotwell, Hancock Shaker Village, Pittsfield, Mass.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 

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