In the Beech Forest ticks all the boxes for encouraging both male and female teenagers (aged about fifteen years) to read. While illustrated books for older readers usually appeal to young males, In the Beech Forest is illustrated by Den Scheer, a young woman in her teens. Ten to fifteen-year-old males would also relate to In the Beech Forest as its theme is a young man's perilous rite of passage in search of self. The youth involved is actually fearful of the monstrous creatures he faces in his computer games and must overcome this fear to become a man-a growth process which is admirably represented visually with all the irony that only a female teenage illustrator could create: not only does the boy triumph, he realises his triumph by imagining the battle between a monstrous male force and a diminutive female force which the female wins! In Real Boys Voices clinical psychologist William Pollack allows his young male clients to speak for themselves, quoting 17-year-old Tom regarding his rite of passage to manhood: ... people should realise what we go through, what we feel, what problems are important and how they can be fixed. (Pollack, W. 2000. Real Boys Voices. Scribe, Melbourne. p. 377). Every teenage boy could therefore relate to In The Beech Forest which uses both visual images and accessible print text to address these very feelings.

This volume compares the beech forests of eastern Asia, North America and Europe. Beech forests are important in each of these three regions. No other book covers beech on this scale. The author has personally studied beech forests in each region, and his large body of data is the starting point for comparison. For such a world-wide comparison to be justified, factors that have most strongly influenced the beech forests should be known. First, use and management of beech forests are compared. They have influenced beech forests for millennia and have been very different in each region. Next, in a historical comparison spread and speciation since the early Tertiary are analysed. Today's beech forests cover a wide range of climates and soils; they occur in cool temperate regions as well as on tropical mountains. The final part compares the trees and forests themselves: growth and form of trees, species composition and populations, forest structure and forest dynamics.

The idea of a Venetian forestry service might strike one as the beginning of a joke. The statement that it began in the fourteenth century would surprise most people. Venice is built on a lagoon with no timber resources. This book reveals the story of Venice's attempt to establish protected forests in order to have a constant supply of wood. Beyond the need for wood for heating and cooking, tall beams of oak and beech were needed for ship building and the shoring up of breakwaters that kept the sea from flooding the city. The author follows the practice of forest conservation and management from its inception in the 1300s to the end of the eighteenth century. He details the administrative and legal debates as well as problems with the implementation of policies. This study is a corrective to histories that assume a lack of interest in forest conservation in Europe at this time. The experience of the Venetians also serves as an example for timber use and conservation today.

In this time of ecological crisis, all that is holy calls us into a more intimate partnership with the diverse and beautiful beings of this earth. In Finding Our Way Home, Myke Johnson reflects on her personal journey into such a partnership and offers a guide for others to begin this path. Lyrically expressed, it weaves together lessons from a chamomile flower, a small bird, a copper beech tree, a garden slug, and a forest fern, along with insights from Indigenous philosophy, environmental science, fractal geometry, childhood Catholic mysticism, the prophet Elijah, fairy tales, and permaculture design. This eco-spiritual journey also wrestles with the history of our society's destruction of the natural world, and its roots in the original theft of the land from Indigenous peoples. Exploring the spiritual dimensions of our brokenness, it offers tools to create healing. Finding Our Way Home is a ceremony to remember our essential unity with all of life.

Sunday Times Bestseller‘A paradigm-smashing chronicle of joyous entanglement’ Charles Foster Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month (September) Are trees social beings? How do trees live? Do they feel pain or have awareness of their surroundings?

"A volume for a lifetime" is how The New Yorker described the first of Donald Culross Peatie's two books about American trees published in the 1950s. In this one-volume edition, modern readers are introduced to one of the best nature writers of the last century. As we read Peattie's eloquent and entertaining accounts of American trees, we catch glimpses of our country's history and past daily life that no textbook could ever illuminate so vividly. Here you'll learn about everything from how a species was discovered to the part it played in our country’s history. Pioneers often stabled an animal in the hollow heart of an old sycamore, and the whole family might live there until they could build a log cabin. The tuliptree, the tallest native hardwood, is easier to work than most softwood trees; Daniel Boone carved a sixty-foot canoe from one tree to carry his family from Kentucky into Spanish territory. In the days before the Revolution, the British and the colonists waged an undeclared war over New England's white pines, which made the best tall masts for fighting ships. It's fascinating to learn about the commercial uses of various woods -- for paper, fine furniture, fence posts, matchsticks, house framing, airplane wings, and dozens of other preplastic uses. But we cannot read this book without the occasional lump in our throats. The American elm was still alive when Peattie wrote, but as we read his account today we can see what caused its demise. Audubon's portrait of a pair of loving passenger pigeons in an American beech is considered by many to be his greatest painting. It certainly touched the poet in Donald Culross Peattie as he depicted the extinction of the passenger pigeon when the beech forest was destroyed. A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.

For years I had wandered Australia with an aching heart. Everywhere I had ever travelled across the vast expanse of the fabulous country where I was born I had seen devastation, denuded hills, eroded slopes, weeds from all over the world, feral animals, open-cut mines as big as cities, salt rivers, salt earth, abandoned townships, whole beaches made of beer cans... One bright day in December 2001, sixty-two-year-old Germaine Greer found herself confronted by an irresistible challenge in the shape of sixty hectares of dairy farm, one of many in south-east Queensland that, after a century of logging, clearing and downright devastation, had been abandoned to their fate. She didn't think for a minute that by restoring the land she was saving the world. She was in search of heart's ease. Beyond the acres of exotic pasture grass and soft weed and the impenetrable curtains of tangled Lantana canes there were Macadamias dangling their strings of unripe nuts, and Black Beans with red and yellow pea flowers growing on their branches ... and the few remaining White Beeches, stupendous trees up to forty metres in height, logged out within forty years of the arrival of the first white settlers. To have turned down even a faint chance of bringing them back to their old haunts would have been to succumb to despair. Once the process of rehabilitation had begun, the chance proved to be a dead certainty. When the first replanting shot up to make a forest and rare caterpillars turned up to feed on the leaves of the new young trees, she knew beyond doubt that at least here biodepletion could be reversed. Greer describes herself as an old dog who succeeded in learning a load of new tricks, inspired and rejuvenated by her passionate love of Australia and of Earth, most exuberant of small planets.