Home Ground


Book Description

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.




Northeast Home Landscaping, 3rd Edition


Book Description

In this series, homeowners will find inspiring ideas for making the home landscape more attractive and functional. Created by landscape professionals in each region, each book contains between 48 and 54 designs with more than 200 plants that are proven performers. Provides detailed instructions for projects such as paths, patios, ponds, and arbors. 170 color photos and 260 full-color illustrations. US: CT, MA, ME, NH, NY, RI, VT SE Canada: NB, NS, ONT, PEI, QUE




The Absent Hand


Book Description

"Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift." —Kirkus Reviews Following her bestselling The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard returns with a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of W. G. Sebald’s work and others of Rebecca Solnit’s, but it is Lessard’s singular talent to combine this profound book–length mosaic— a blend of historical travelogue, reportorial probing, philosophical meditation, and prose poem—into a work of unique genius, as she describes and reimagines our landscapes. In this exploration of our surroundings, The Absent Hand contends that to reimagine landscape is a form of cultural reinvention. This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place and reimagining the world in a time of transition. Whether it be climate change altering the meaning of nature, or digital communications altering the nature of work, the effects of global enclosure on the meaning of place are panoramic, infiltrative, inescapable. No one will finish this book, this journey, without having their ideas of living and settling in their surroundings profoundly enriched.




Notes on the Landscape of Home


Book Description

“If you pay attention to the land where you live, you enter into conversation with it, until it becomes a voice inside you, and some of the boundaries between you and it dissolve,” write Susan Hand Shetterly. In this collection of elegant, spare, and often passionate essays, Shetterly explores what it is to live in a Down East coastal town, and to pay attention, over time, to what it offers of land, water, wildlife, and community. She takes her cue from Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry, who advocate for the virtues of staying in one place, believing that as we delve deeper into the landscape of home the more we learn about the world. As in many other places, this particular home place is in trouble. Shetterly celebrates the work of communities to restore environments their people know and love, and takes a closeup look at what is changing and what has been lost. Among her subjects are the reestablishment of the bald eagle, the reintroduction of the American turkey in Maine, and the turkey vulture’s northward trend. She also writes about shorebird migrations, the bluefin tuna and the humpback and right whales in the Gulf of Maine, counting alewives along a stream in the spring, seaweed cultivation in a bay, a forest’s rebirth, the island that gave her the imaginative space she needed, and more. She recounts how she and her neighbors kept each other company at a distance during the long months of the pandemic, and she celebrates coastal culture, its particular, deep history that anchors a person’s sense of place.




Our Vanishing Landscape


Book Description

This book takes readers on a leisurely journey through a bygone era with fascinating accounts of canals, corduroy roads, and turnpikes, waterwheels and icehouses, colorful road signs and their painters, circus folk, and more. Brimming with anecdotes about people and the times, this delightful narrative remains a milestone of Americana. 81 black-and-white illustrations.




Light on the Landscape


Book Description

See the images and read the stories behind the creative process of one of America’s most respected landscape photographers, William Neill.

For more than two decades, William Neill has been offering his thoughts and insights about photography and the beauty of nature in essays that cover the techniques, business, and spirit of his photographic life. Curated and collected here for the first time, these essays are both pragmatic and profound, offering readers an intimate look behind the scenes at Neill’s creative process behind individual photographs as well as a discussion of the larger and more foundational topics that are key to his philosophy and approach to work.

Drawing from the tradition of behind-the-scenes books like Ansel Adams’ Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs and Galen Rowell’s Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape, Light on the Landscape covers in detail the core photographic fundamentals such as light, composition, camera angle, and exposure choices, but it also deftly considers those subjects that are less frequently examined: portfolio development, marketing, printmaking, nature stewardship, inspiration, preparation, self-improvement, and more. The result is a profound and wide-ranging exploration of that magical convergence of light, land, and camera.

Filled with beautiful and inspiring photographs, Light on the Landscape is also full of the kind of wisdom that only comes from a deeply thoughtful photographer who has spent a lifetime communicating with a camera. Incorporating the lessons within the book, you too can learn to achieve not only technically excellent and beautiful images, but photographs that truly rise above your best and reveal your deeply personal and creative perspective—your vision, your voice.




Brick in the Landscape


Book Description

Backstein ist das am häufigsten eingesetzte Material in der Landschaftsgestaltung, z.B. in Form von Mauern, Treppenstufen und Fußwegen. Aufgrund seiner ungewöhnlichen Eigenschaften, ist es schwierig, genaue Angaben zu machen, insbesondere wenn das Material Wind und Wetter ausgesetzt ist. Bei korrekter Verarbeitung ist Backstein ein kostengünstiges und dauerhaftes Material, doch das Problem liegt in der korrekten Verarbeitung. Dieses erste Buch zum Thema gibt eine umfassende Beschreibung der Eigenschaften von Backstein, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf den Grundlagen und praktischen Informationen zur Verarbeitung liegt. Mit zahlreichen Illustrationen zu stabilen und ansprechenden Backsteinkonstruktionen. (y09/99)




Notes on a Shared Landscape


Book Description

A rich collage of stories and photographs exploring our imperfect love affair with the American West.




William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape


Book Description

Charles S. Aiken, a native of Mississippi who was born a few miles from Oxford, has been thinking and writing about the geography of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County for more than thirty years. William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape is the culmination of that long-term scholarly project. It is a fresh approach to a much-studied writer and a provocative meditation on the relationship between literary imagination and place. Four main geographical questions shape Aiken's journey to the family seat of the Compsons and the Snopeses. What patterns and techniques did Faulkner use--consciously or subconsciously--to convert the real geography of Lafayette County into a fictional space? Did Faulkner intend Yoknapatawpha to serve as a microcosm of the American South? In what ways does the historical geography of Faulkner's birthplace correspond to that of the fictional world he created? Finally, what geographic legacy has Faulkner left us through the fourteen novels he set in Yoknapatawpha? With an approach, methodology, and sources primarily derived from historical geography, Aiken takes the reader on a tour of Faulkner's real and imagined worlds. The result is an informed reading of Faulkner's life and work and a refined understanding of the relation of literary worlds to the real places that inspire them.




Singing The City


Book Description

Singing the City is an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America, using Pittsburgh as a lens. Graham is not blind to the damage industry has done—both to people and to the environment, but she shows us that there is also a rich human story that has gone largely untold, one that reveals, in all its ambiguities, the place of the industrial landscape in the heart. Singing the City is a celebration of a landscape that through most of its history has been unabashedly industrial. Convinced that industrial landscapes are too little understood and appreciated, Graham set out to investigate the city's landscape, past and present, and to learn the lessons she sensed were there about living a good life. The result, told in both her voice and the distinctive voices of the people she meets, is a powerful contribution to the literature of place. Graham begins by showing the city as an outgrowth of its geography and its geology—the factors that led to its becoming an industrial place. She describes the human investment in the area: the floods of immigrants who came to work in the mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their struggles within the domains of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. She evokes the superhuman aura of making steel by taking the reader to still functioning mills and uncovers for us a richness of tradition in ethnic neighborhoods that survives to this day.