The hillsides of Attica are stony and arid. Over-grazed in the past by goats and sheep, they have few trees and are covered in dense, pickly scrub. Relentless sun and often strong winds prevail for five months of the year, and in the spring and autumn months the miracle of the extraordinary variety and beauty of the Greek flora is revealed to the discerning eye.It was on such a hillside that the author, a Harvard University professor chose to make a garden. This book is the story of the making of that garden and a distillation of what she learnt and observed about the plants - both native and introduced - she grew there, a book which she wrote to assist other people wishing to make gardens in places with a "Mediterranean climate", believing that anything that grew under the difficult conditions prevailing on this Greek hillside would be almost certain to grow better elsewhere.

In Gardens of the Roman Empire, the pioneering archaeologist Wilhelmina F. Jashemski sets out to examine the role of ancient Roman gardens in daily life throughout the empire. This study, therefore, includes for the first time, archaeological, literary, and artistic evidence about ancient Roman gardens across the entire Roman Empire from Britain to Arabia. Through well-illustrated essays by leading scholars in the field, various types of gardens are examined, from how Romans actually created their gardens to the experience of gardens as revealed in literature and art. Demonstrating the central role and value of gardens in Roman civilization, Jashemski and a distinguished, international team of contributors have created a landmark reference work that will serve as the foundation for future scholarship on this topic. An accompanying digital catalogue will be made available at: www.gardensoftheromanempire.org.

When Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment...and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think - and even see - the world differently, because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China, and that have survived into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic" - drawn to the perceptual field as a whole, and to relations among objects and events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought relies far less on categories, or on formal logic; it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a "middle way" between opposing thoughts. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behaviour.

A large-format, beautifully illustrated, complete guide to gardening in a California and Mediterraean-like climates, defined as ones in which winters are wet and summers are bone dry.

Nothing could be more important than the health of our children, and no one is better suited to examine the threats against it than Sandra Steingraber. Once called "a poet with a knife," she blends precise science with lyrical memoir. In Living Downstream she spoke as a biologist and cancer survivor; in Having Faith she spoke as an ecologist and expectant mother, viewing her own body as a habitat. Now she speaks as the scientist mother of two young children, enjoying and celebrating their lives while searching for ways to protect them -- and all children -- from the toxic, climate-threatened world they inhabit Each chapter of this engaging and unique book focuses on one inevitable ingredient of childhood -- everything from pizza to laundry to homework to the "Big Talk" -- and explores the underlying social, political, and ecological forces behind it. Through these everyday moments, Steingraber demonstrates how closely the private, intimate world of parenting connects to the public world of policy-making and how the ongoing environmental crisis is, fundamentally, a crisis of family life.