About this item

A wise and poetic field guide to the lives, habits, and quirks of the natural world awaiting just beyond your doorstep ."If there is grass and a few scraggling trees, there will be wildlife," suggests John Hanson Mitchell, an internationally recognized naturalist and advocate for tuning your senses to the wonders that await in your own backyard. Whether your yard consists of a small patch of grass or a rambling mix of forest and field, Mitchell will introduce you to the wealth of plants, insects, and animals that share your patch of the planet.You'll learn how the behavior at the birdfeeder mirrors that of the deepest woods. You'll get a gander at the rich ecology of the woodpile. You'll get to know the neighbors you never knew you had who make their homes under the bark and in the holes of the trees.



About the Author

John Hanson Mitchell

Most of John Hanson Mitchell's work is focused on a square mile tract of land known as Scratch Flat, located about thirty-five miles north-west of Boston. Mitchell has used this anomalous landscape of rolling hills, farms, forests and encroaching suburbs to explore his continuing interest in natural and human history and the whole question of place in human cultures, both native and European. Best known of this series of books is the first, Ceremonial Time:Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile. The latest book in the group is An Eden of Sorts: The Natural History of My Feral Garden. All of these books have been collected together in a series known as The Scratch Flat Chronicles.

Other books explore the relationship between culture, nature, and place both here and abroad. These works deal with such disparate subjects as the relationship between Italian gardens and the American wilderness and the role of the sun in various cultures, outlined in the book Following the Sun, a 1500 mile bicycle journey he made from Cadiz in Spain, north to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. His last book among these is The Paradise of all These Parts, a natural history of the little peninsula that became the city of Boston.



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