Author Jack Sanders explores the lives & lore of more than 80 of North America's most popular wildflowers, describing the origins of their names, their places in history & literature, what uses ancient herbalists found for them, what uses they have now, where they grow, how they reproduce, & how to grow or transplant them.

Winner of the 2015 Adirondack Literary Award for Best Memoir presented by the Adirondack Center for Writing Born just north of New York City, Edward Kanze traveled as far as the wilds of Australia and New Zealand, working as a naturalist, park ranger, and nature writer, before finally settling in New York's Adirondacks for the riskiest of all life's adventures: marriage and children. Adirondack tells the story of how he and his wife, Debbie, bought a tumbledown house, rescued it from ruin, started a family, and planted themselves deep in Adirondack soil. Along the way, he brings the unique history of this area to life by sharing stories of his ancestors, who have lived there for generations, and by offering captivating descriptions of the world around him. A keen observer, Kanze will charm readers with his tales of bears, birds, and fluorescent mice.

What could be better than watching the natural world out your window or on your television? Going out and experiencing it firsthand. In these fifty essays, acclaimed nature and science writer Sy Montgomery takes her readers on a season-by-season tour of the wilderness that is often as close as the backyard. Sy invites — almost dares — readers to follow her and form hands-on relationships with the plants, animals, birds, and even the insects that share space with people. These essays, most of which originally appeared in Sy's Boston Globe column Nature Journal, are by turns enlightening, entertaining, sometimes amusing, and always absorbing and informative. Filled with natural history and lore, the essays urge readers to appreciate what they find around them.

Since its publication in 1908, Anne of Green Gables has been a continuous international best-seller, enjoying successful television adaptations on PBS and The Disney Channel, and captivating children and adults alike with the irresistible charms of its remarkable heroine, Anne Shirley. This wildly imaginative, red-headed chatterbox tries to fit into the narrow confines of Victorian expectations, but her exuberant spirit keeps leaping delightfully beyond the bounds. Indeed, when Maud Montgomery decided to reject the sermonizing formulas of the children's books of her day, she brought to life a character much closer to Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Tom Sawyer--also orphans, like Anne--than to the self-sacrificing, conformist heroines then in demand. In doing so, Montgomery subtly questioned the values of her society--the stifling restraints of its religion and most especially its treatment of women--while giving readers all the pleasures of her considerable story-telling gifts. Now, in this first fully annotated edition of Anne of Green Gables, readers will appreciate more clearly than ever before the scope and depth of this extraordinary novel. Editors Margaret Anne Doody, Mary Doody Jones, and Wendy Barry provide a richly illustrated, completely revised text, along with hundreds of notes describing the real-life characters and settings Anne encounters, the autobiographical connections between Anne and Maud Montgomery, and the book's astonishing range of literary, biblical, and mythological references. Additional essays offer fascinating background information on such topics as the geography and settlement of Prince Edward Island (where Anne takes place); the education, orphanages, music, and literature of Anne's time; and the horticulture, homemade artifacts, and food preparation that are so prevalent in the story. Margaret Anne Doody supplies a comprehensive introduction, which situates the novel in its literary and social contexts, explores those aspects of Montgomery's life most relevant to the story, examines revisions in the manuscripts, and provides an overall sense of both the impulses that drove Montgomery to write Anne of Green Gables and the larger concerns it dramatizes so compellingly. This edition also contains a chronology of Montgomery's life, an extensive bibliography, songs and poems that appear in the text, and a selection of original reviews of the book. This wealth of material enables readers to grasp the marvelous multi-layeredness of the novel and to understand more fully its place in both its own time and in ours. Elegantly and beautifully designed, with generous illustrations from previous editions, photographs of the places the novel inhabits, and explanatory drawings that reproduce the texture of Anne's world, The Annotated Anne of Green Gables is a major event in the publishing history of one of the world's most charming stories.

Dryden's Second Hundred Years (Part I) chronicles life in a small farming village in Central New York during the first half of the twentieth century. But along with a close reading of the local scene-its telephones, roads, real and rumored milk strikes, and letters back home from the trenches of two wars-this narrative has a wide arc and rich texture: author Elizabeth Denver Gutchess dovetails local history with national and international events which shaped and countered it-as she explores connections and disconnections between this small community and the world at large. Essentially, in fact, Dryden's Second Hundred Years records a transformation of place, as Dryden's tightly woven social fabric slowly unraveled during the century, while ever-lengthening strands of road and cable reached farther and farther beyond this small hill-rimmed valley-weaving ever wider and more life-enhancing communities for the people who live here. At a time when the process of globalization outweighs all things local, however, it is important to keep balance. The global village, as many have warned, will be enriched not by neglecting the local but by taking care of it. One way to do that is simply to know and understand the local past. Like the body of fine work already produced by Dryden historians-and by local historians everywhere-this book might help us do that.

Celebrating nearby nature and the marvels of our own backyards, this book helps you introduce children to the world around them. With quality children's literature and simple activities, you can cultivate a child's sense of wonder and joy and teach him or her the importance of living in harmony with nature. These projects span the curriculum and are presented in reproducible format, so they're easy to use. Highlighting the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch), they build connections between students and the land and create in young learners a sense of place-a true necessity for living in the world today. Grades K-6.