More importantly, Some Branch against the Sky sets us thinking about what a garden is and how it differs from its surroundings; about cultivation and wilderness, and how we can tread the border between the two; about climate and situation and how we can learn the most from those that appear the least favourable if we work with rather than against them. And it suggests how, gardeners or not, we can help reduce the loss of our near-wild habitat by integrating with our own chosen part of it.

A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden. Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and J. B. Jackson. As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining. In Overgrown, Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development; landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way. Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material that he terms “the viridic” (after “the tectonic” in architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of gardens that range from “formal” to “informal” approaches—from a sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's “marginal” garden, barely differentiated from nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice itself needs to be “gardened,” brought back into the field. He offers a “Manifesto for the Viridic” that casts designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening.

Illustrating the dominant features of many common species — elm, maple, willow, apple, more — this manual includes two portraits of each variety, in pencil and other media. 34 drawings.

How do we get fifth-grade writers to revise? And once we do get them thinking about revision, what, exactly, do they do? What do we do? In Patterns of Revision, best-selling authors Whitney La Rocca and Jeff Anderson answer these questions and more. This practical resource uses the research-proven and classroom-tested methods of sentence combining in a meaningful, engaging way that supports authentic writing as well as writing for performance-based or multiple-choice tests. Flip the book open to immediately find: • The DRAFT mnemonic to help students know where to begin the revision process and how to keep going • Concrete, doable lessons that spark academic conversations (oral rehearsal and play) about meaning, effect, and purpose that are grounded in a student-centered revision approach • Easily accessed display and printable pages to seamlessly support student revision learning, embedded in each lesson right where you need it • Authentic and engaging model text excerpts curated to support each lesson • An engaging process for revision instruction that can be immediately implemented to support any writing approach or as a supplemental resource for Patterns of Power, 1-5 as well as Patterns of Power Plus, Grade 5 With every lesson grounded in the critical strategy of writers talking out their revisions, Patterns of Revision will establish routines, practices, and mindsets to set up you and your students for success from Day 1. Discover the joy inherent in writing—and writing instruction—by exploring revision through engaging inquiry and the study of models, building flexible, competent revisors, step-by-step, in an open-ended discussion of meaning-driven revision choices and their effects.

Federal Twist is set on a ridge above the Delaware River in western New Jersey. It is a naturalistic garden that has loose boundaries and integrates closely with the natural world that surrounds it. It has no utilitarian or leisure uses (no play areas, swimming pools, or outdoor dining) and the site is not an obvious choice for a garden (heavy clay soil, poorly drained: quick death for any plants not ecologically suited to it). The physical garden, its plants and its features, is of course an appealing and pleasant place to be but Federal Twist's real charm and significance lie in its intangible aspects: its changing qualities and views, the moods and emotions it evokes, and its distinctive character and sense of place. This book charts the author's journey in making such a garden. How he made a conscious decision not to "improve the land", planted large, competitive plants into rough grass, experimented with seeding to develop sustainable plant communities. And how he worked with light to provoke certain moods and allowed the energy of the place, chance, and randomness to have its say. Part experimental horticulturist and part philosopher, James Golden has written an important book for naturalistic and ecological gardeners and anyone interested in exploring the relationship between gardens, nature, and ourselves.