“I was only six years old when I ‘dug up’ my first dinosaur from the inside of a cereal box. The plastic model inspired my imagination in a powerful way that led to regular visits to the dinosaur galleries at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. Several times a week, I would go to Sixteen Mile Creek near my home to scramble up and down the cliffs of Ordovician sediments, collecting marine invertebrate fossils while I fantasized about discovering dinosaurs. I read (and reread) every book that was available to me about any fossils from anywhere. After reading All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews when I was 11 years old, I knew that I wanted to be a dinosaur hunter. Such is the power of the written word.”
From that start, Philip Currie went on to help found the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, and is now a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He has worked extensively in China, and helped describe some of the first feathered dinosaurs. Philip is also the co-author of several books including The Flying Dinosaurs, and Dinosaur Provincial Park: A Spectacular Ancient Ecosystem Revealed.
And here’s the book and author that inspired Philip Currie. Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960) was best known for leading a series of expeditions to Mongolia and the Gobi Desert — bringing home the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs. Eventually Andrews became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He was also a prolific author for both adults and children.
Chet Raymo has long been a favorite of the Land Library. His writing offers a unique combination of science & spirituality — and what a beautiful writer! Here’s Chet Raymo on the roots of wonder:
“I have had occasion over the years to make reference to Dr. Suess, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, Lewis Carrol’s Alice books, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Felix Salten’s Bambi, and other children’s books. In writing about science I have made reference to children’s books far more frequently than to adult literary works. This is not an accident. In children’s books we are at the roots of science — pure, childlike curiosity, eyes open with wonder to the fresh and new, and the powers of invention still unfettered by convention and expectation.”
Always in search of inspiration, the Land Library will continue to return to a central theme over the next few weeks: the intrinsic value of reading, the power of books, and those first moments — our childhood encounters with the printed page. Our continued source of inspiration for these posts will be Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood (pictured above), a wonderful blend of scholarly insight and personal memoir. Maria Tatar has also included an invaluable appendix which records writer’s recollections of how books changed their lives — writers such as Chet Raymo.
Next Week: Paleontologist Philip Currie and the Book that Shaped his Life
Why did this book become the Land Library’s page-by-page preoccupation over the past week? It’s title might seem a bit dull: Fodder and Pasture Plants, written by George H. Clark and M. Oscar Malte, and published in 1913 by the Department of Agriculture, Canada.
But here is where our reading experience changed. Our sense of touch was engaged first. The 100-year old cloth cover gave us a tactile pleasure that no modern dust jacket can provide. As we delved into the text, there was much to learn from Clarke and Malte’s complete botanical description of each plant, unexpectedly enlivened by occasional quotes from the likes of Xenophon, Pliny, Virgil, Chaucer, and Shakespeare!
Books are built of chapters and parts. Here’s the part we love best from our century-old copy of Fodder and Pasture Plants: more than 25 full-color plates, from the brush of Norman Criddle. Here’s just two of Criddle’s beautiful depictions:
“Brome grass is extensively grown in Hungary, where the climate is much like that of the Canadian West…“
“Red Top is indigenous to all European countries, Northern Africa, North and Central Asia, and North America.“
from the preface:
“It is, therefore, the purpose of this book to provide, in a form convenient for reference, fairly comprehensible information about those grasses, clovers, and other fodder and pasture plants that are generally to be of value in Canada.“
Yes — and maybe something more!
Our thanks goes to the folks at Small Farmer’s Journal. Their recent feature led us to the Land Library’s most recent acquisition — Clarke & Malte’s Fodder and Pasture Plants!
Thanks to the generosity (and imagination!) of a Land Library supporter, a few times each year we receive a shipment from an English bookseller. As you can imagine, we’re always excited to open a well-traveled box of new and used books, containing treasures we have never before seen, this side of the Atlantic.
In the middle of National Poetry Month, we wanted to sing the praises of one very special book from the UK — The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee. What a wonderful anthology!
The editors have arranged their collection by bird type, not poet. There’s Sylvia Plath on the shrike, Elizabeth Bishop on the sandpiper, Robinson Jeffers on hawks, John Ashberry on orioles, W.S. Merwin on crows, Edward Thomas on lapwings, Kathleen Jamie on the dipper, and Wallace Stevens on the red-winged blackbird. There’s certainly a wide range of birds written about in this 384-page collection, and just of few of the other featured poets include Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, Marianne Moore, Paul Muldoon, Alice Oswald, John Clare, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and many, many more.
Here’s a very fun link to The Guardian, which lists Simon Armitage and Tim Dee’s Top 10 Bird Poems, starting with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover: ” a poem that enacts as well as describes, as if Hopkins were channelling a kestrel hovering 100 feet up in the wind; it is mind-blowing no matter how many times you read it.“
And for all you bird-lovers out there — and come to think of it — all you poetry-lovers, now’s the time to get your tickets for the Colorado premiere of the award-winning film, The Legend of Pale Male!
The Land Library is proud to be a co-sponsor of this benefit screening for The Bloomsbury Review, a national literary treasure that has been celebrating and promoting great writing since 1980. We’ll be celebrating two legends that night — The Bloomsbury Review, as it launches into its next chapter, and Pale Male, the famous red-tailed hawk of Central Park, now courting his eighth mate somewhere over midtown Manhattan!
WHEN & WHERE: Saturday, April 27th, 6:30pm at Denver’s Montview Presbyterian Church
For more information on the April 27th premiere, call 303-455-3123, or 800-783-3338, or visit The Bloomsbury Review website!
“The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.” — Carlos Fuentes
Good news! The Land Library continues to work toward opening a Urban Homestead Library in inner-city Denver, along with our second Kids and Educators Nature Library. We’ve been devoting more and more of our resources to find some of the best urban nature books available. These books are wonderful tools, and a powerful remedy for ever taking your home town for granted!
Books such as these, that help you learn about:
BIRDS, BEES…
AND TREES!
NEW NEIGHBORS…
FOOD…
and PLENTY OF FUN PLACES TO EXPLORE!
For the rest of this month, we’ll be featuring many more books on nature in the city — all leading up to the April 27th Colorado premiere of the award-winning film The Legend of Pale Male:
The Land Library is proud to be a co-sponsor of this benefit screening for The Bloomsbury Review, a national literary treasure that has been celebrating and promoting great writing since 1980. We’ll be celebrating two legends that night — The Bloomsbury Review, as it launches into its next chapter, and Pale Male, the famous red-tailed hawk of Central Park, now courting his eighth mate somewhere over midtown Manhattan!
WHEN & WHERE: Saturday, April 27th, 6:30pm at Denver’s Montview Presbyterian Church
For more information on the April 27th premiere, call 303-455-3123, or 800-783-3338, or visit The Bloomsbury Review website!
“Russia’s geography is rich in forest, and it’s culture is abundant in the spirits and heroes that traverse it. The national literature has ventured deep into these woods, but Western critics have only rarely followed. Costlow’s marvelous book stands in the middle of this forest and points to wonders all around. This is a beautiful, meditative, and insightful book that opens up new worlds of appreciation for both literature and nature.” — William Nickell on Jane T. Costlow’s Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest
Russia has more woodlands than any country in the world, and its forests have loomed large in Russian folklore, culture, and history. Russan forests have long been the focus of naturalist wonder, scientific scrutiny, and poetic imagination. For some the forest was the imaginary landscape of their religious homeland, for others it was the locus of peasant culture and local knowledge. In Heart-Pine Russia, Jane Costlow explores the central place the forest has held in the Russian imagination.
Costlow considers the work of authors such as Turgenev and Tolstoy, and artists like Shishkin, Repin, and Nesterov. One of our favorite chapters focuses on Dmitrii Kaigorodov, a forester and natural historian who was a John Burroughs-like figure offering popular works in the end of the Imperial era. (His most famous book was titled Chats about the Russian Forest — the Land Library’s latest book we would love to find!).
Author John Randolph has this to say about Heart-Pine Russia: “The struggle to really see and hear the life of Russia’s forests infuses Costlow’s story with many lyrical moments…” The Land Library is thrilled to find a book with so many fresh insights into another culture’s natural history traditions. Jane Costlow’s book joins several more on our shelves:
One of the first Russian natural history books we ever read: Nature’s Diary by Mikhail Prishvin (the Penguin edition includes an appreciation from John Updike), and a former Land Series book, The Storks’ Nest: Life and Love in the Russian Countryside, Laura Williams’ wonderful memoir of moving from Colorado to live and work in the Russian outback, eventually marrying international nature photographer Igor Shpilenok. The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky’s sensitively drawn portrait of native people in the modern world, and Dersu the Trapper, V.K. Arseniev’s (1872-1930) description of three expeditions to the Ussurian taiga (along the Sea of Japan) and his classic encounters with the solitary aboriginal hunter named Dersu. It’s amazing how many current-day nature writers have been influenced by Arseniev’s book!
The Tiger: A True Story of Revenge and Survival — one of the most popular books the Land Library Book Club has ever read. Covering the same landscape as Dersu the Trapper, John Vaillant tells the tale of the mighty Amur tiger, and the hard life of the Russian outback. A wonderful writer! As is, Ian Frazier. His Travels in Siberia describes the land, the people, and the dark chapters of Russia’s Siberian experience.
“Who are we when we enter the forest? What happens to our personalities, our languages, our histories, our narratives? The essays in this book explore a tradition of writing and envisioning Russia’s great European forest — diminished and vulnerable, but lovely and powerful and in many ways daunting to those who entered it…” Jane T. Costlow, in Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest
Last week’s post announced the April 27th Colorado premiere of The Legend of Pale Male, Frederic Lilien’s award-winning film celebrating the story of what happened when a red-tailed hawk (Pale Male) suddenly nests along the high-rise apartments surrounding New York City’s Central Park. The result: one of the best films we’ve ever seen on nature in the city!
A central character in Pale Male’s story is Charles Kennedy — naturalist, poet, and photographer. Marie Winn offers this personal insight in her book Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife: “When I first met him back in the early 1990′s, Charles was trying to become a birdwatcher. His goal was to find every bird mentioned in a book called Falconer of Central Park, and I think he was up to 65 out of the book’s 150 species on the day I ran into him. When a young red-tailed hawk arrived in the park a few months later, Charles put his list away. He had lost his heart to a single bird. That was when he and I began to follow Pale Male and the wildly successful nest on Fifth Avenue.”
Charles Kennedy’s red-tail essays and photographs are compiled in Pale Male & Family (pictured above, and thoughtfully edited by Steve Kennedy). Pale Male may have captured Charles Kennedy’s attention — but not all his attention. He was just as likely to drop to his knees to watch cicadas emerge, or spiders weaving their webs. Day turns to night, and Charles and his friends would lead nightly excursions into America’s greatest urban parks. Or as Charles Kennedy wrote:
the sun drops
the cold slides in
owl time
Steve Kennedy, Charles’ nephew, has edited his uncle’s essays, haiku, and photography in the book Owls of Central Park. Steve writes in his introduction:
“The last time I was with Charles was two weeks before he lost his battle with cancer. During that last quiet time together, what he most wanted to do was read to me from his newest compilation, his ‘owl book.’ He had engaged his friends in producing, by hand, large copies of the book — in part to keep them from focusing on his deteriorating health, and in part to make sure it was finished and available to his close network of friends and family. As Charles read his book about Central Park owls he charged me with tending to his large body of written and photographic work. So this book has a special place in my heart. It also is a favorite among Charles’ friends and acquaintances.“
This memorial plaque can be found on a bench in Central Park, not far from where Pale Male flies to this very day:
Friends choose a particularly apt haiku from Charles Kennedy’s notebooks, to honor Charles’ many days (and nights) in a place he loved best.
Here’s a wonderful volume that preserves more of Charles Kennedy’s work:
The Fish Jumps Out of the Moon: Haiku of Charles F. Kennedy, edited by Steve Kennedy and Dan Guenther.
SAVE THE DATE!!
Charles Kennedy’s books will be available for purchase at the Colorado premiere of The Legend of Pale Male (Saturday, April 27th, 6:30pm, at Denver’s Montview Presbyterian Church). All proceeds will benefit The Bloomsbury Review — a literary legend in its own right.
You’ll love the film’s trailer (below), and keep your eyes open for Charles Kennedy, always searching the skyline for the most famous red-tailed hawk in the world:
For more information on the April 27th premiere, call 303-455-3123, or 800-783-3338, or visit The Bloomsbury Review website!
Well, if you don’t speak French, no worries — read on! Recently, a Land Library friend from Quebec donated one of the most remarkable books on bees and beekeeping that we have ever seen. Eric Tourneret’s Le Peuple des Abeilles will always have an honored place on the Land Library’s shelves!
The text may be in French, but Tourneret’s photographs speak volumes. Many of the photos give such an upclose view of the bee’s world that you’d swear Tourneret strapped cameras to the backs of worker bees:
A steady stream of incoming bees, with pollen baskets full.
In some ways our personal inability to read the text liberated us to focus on the incredible patterns of another world:
Eric Tourneret also turns his lens on an equally fascinating creature: the beekeeper:
Le Peuple des Abeilles tells the tale of beekeepers employing both modern and traditional techniques. There are wonderful photo-essays on the capture of wild swarms, and the never-say-die efforts of urban beekeepers — including a few atop the Paris Opera House!
Eric Tourneret has seen a hidden world through his lens, and we’re happy he shared it:
If you don’t speak French, or if you someday hope to speak Bee, you’ll really enjoy this short clip!
Someday we hope a publisher issues an English translation of Le Peuple des Abeilles — but then again, we loved the visual odyssey we’ve been on, ever since Eric Tourneret’s classic book arrived from our generous friend in Quebec!
One of the first pieces the Land Library ever posted was on the great French entomologist, J. Henri Fabre. We have no doubt that he would have loved Le Peuple des Abeilles as much as we do:
“By making Florissant a national monument in 1969, the United States guaranteed protection to an important natural place, a quiet place where we can think about our earthly roots. Looking up, we can watch the kestrels dive like blue angels in search of grasshoppers, while we stand in the graveyard of a great fallen community — the Florissant ecosystem of the Eocene. Here, with the wonder of a child, we can take the mental journey back through the geologic ages.” – Estella Leopold
In the summer of 1969, one of the world’s premier fossil beds nearly became an A-frame housing subdivision. Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument was saved by a grassroots group of scientists, conservationists, and local ranchers, along with a precedent-setting legal team. As Estella Leopold, one of the founding members of the Defenders of Florissant, once commented, “How can a group of citizens take on the real estate establishment? Well…it’s love and science and good lawyers.“
For details on Estella Leopold’s Land Series program, please click here!
Estella Leopold’s co-author, Herbert W. Meyer, also wrote the classic work, The Fossils of Florissant — the subject of a truly memorable Land Series program in 2003.
“If one of the pleasures in visiting Florissant is seeing the landscapes and imagining what they were like in outline 34 million years ago, what makes the experience so vivid is the incredible preservation of the fossil-bearing rocks themselves. It is a far different experience than looking at a set of hand-sized fossils on display in a glass cabinet.” — Estella Leopold
Estella Leopold, Tom Lamm, former Governor Dick Lamm, Attorney Victor Yannacone, Jr., and Superintendent Keith Payne celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.
The fight to save Florissant is one of Colorado’s greatest stories of conservation, grassroots activism, and devotion to the land. A land ethic that runs deep in the Leopold family, from Estella’s early days at her family’s Sand County shack:
For much more on the Leopold’s ongoing legacy, be sure to visit the Aldo Leopold Foundation‘s website, which includes a special section on Estella Leopold.
At the Sand County shack, 1939: rear: Aldo & Estella Leopold, Luna, Starker(kneeling); front: Nina, young Estella, and Gus, a treasured dog that has everyone’s attention.
A couple of years ago, the Rocky Mountain Land Series was lucky enough to host Gary Lincoff for his authoritative (and extremely fun) book, The Complete Mushroom Hunter. In his latest book, The Joy of Foraging, Lincoff takes on the entire plant kingdom. This is a wonderfully illustrated handbook, and Gary’s enthusiasm is certainly infectious. He’ll have you searching out nuts, wild fruits, edible greens — and even seaweeds. Along the way, you’ll learn much more about the place where you live.
That’s exactly what happened to John Lewis-Stempel. Looking around his English farm he saw a trout flash in the brook, mushrooms sprinkled across his fields, and a squirrel eating hazelnuts. That led him to think, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could live on what nature provides for free? The result is one of the most unusual and well-written books we’ve read in quite sometime: The Wild Life: A Year of Living on Wild Food (also pictured above).
Here’s John Lewis-Stempel on the humble hazelnut: ” There is no sensible reason for me to be out at eleven at night, shining a torch up into the leaves and incipient catkins, gathering hazelnuts. Whatever is left on these few last trees will remain till first light, when I will have to come back anyway with a shepherd’s crook to pull down the high branches, an exercise impossible to combine with torch-holding. I am picking solely to do something to satisfy a squirrel-like urge to store up for the oncoming winter….
Hazelnuts are more amenable to the jaw when roasted, when they become starchy, like semolina. Roasted hazelnuts can also be pressed for oil. The process is laborious and the amount of pale amber oil that can be obtained from a pound of nuts is to be measured in parts of a teaspoon. Hazelnut oil is precious. Outside of duck fat, it is the only cooking oil I can obtain from the land.”
Here’s two more books on the art of feeding free!
Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, Langdon Cook’s foraging tale from the Pacific Northwest, and A Feast of Weeds: A Literary Guide to Foraging and Cooking Wild Edible Plants by Luigi Ballerini.
As for urban foraging, we’ve been really inspired by the work of this group:
The London Orchard Project plants new community orchards, rejuvenates neglected ones, and (in one of their strokes of sheer genius), they map existing London fruit trees, all ripe for foraging:
For more on foraging in the wild, here’s one of our all-time favorite past posts:
