THE GREENHOUSE

Welcome to the Greenhouse! This thread is dedicated to discussions and books around nature and our interactions with it. A vast subject!

We humans are a part of nature. We have been shaped by our environment and have shaped it in turn. And being humans, we have a lot of stories around nature. We admire or despise it, we fear it, we worship it, we deify it, we anthropomorphize it, we study it, we exploit it, we destroy it and we try to preserve it. And we write books about it!

I have a very poor track record as a thread keeper, but I will try to check in from time to time. And in my absence, please don't hesitate to talk amongst yourselves. There will be no test and no grading.

Here is the link to last year's thread

(Photo of a tree in my mother’s garden)

(Reserved for book recommendations)

Love the picture. Curious what will show up here

Well, I'll start. I've just gotten The Lost Words from ILL at the library. I wasn't expecting a huge coffee-table-sized book, but it is. It is utterly gorgeous, and I think I might have to purchase my own copy. I only have it for a couple of weeks, but I will save it to make it one of my first books read in 2025. Here is the "blurb" from the back cover:
"When a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary - widely used in schools around the world - was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these "lost words" included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these substitutions - the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual - became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world. Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a "spell book" that will conjure back twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. By the magic of word and paint, they sought to summon these words again into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike, and to celebrate the wonder and importance of everyday nature. The Lost Words is that book - a work that has already cast its extraordinary spell on hundreds of thousands of people and begun a grass-roots movement to re-wild childhood across Britain, Europe, and North America."

This was one of my "random" non-fiction picks for 2024. I generally add all of the Wainwright shortlist to my TBR. Each of the words in this alphabet book is accompanied by the poetry of Robert Macfarlane, and full two-page spreads of the beautiful art work of Jackie Morris.

I received What It's Like to Be a Bird by David Allen Sibley for Christmas. It's a beautiful, coffee table sized book that I'm excited to dip in to. I also highly recommend a book I just finished called Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. It didn't have a lot of information that I didn't know, but it's a lovely nature journal with absolutely beautiful bird sketches that Amy Tan did herself. I found it a beautiful book to spend time with over the hectic holiday season.

The Lost Words sounds fabulous. The one good thing about the covid shut down was that my kids and I spent the year exploring the mature woods and creek just at the bottom of our street. My boys were 10 and 7 and fantastic ages to really dig in and spend time outdoors.

>4 WelshBookworm: That’s a fantastic back story, and it sounds like the book lives up to it!

>4 WelshBookworm: Love The Lost Words. The art and the poetics. Ever since Margaret Atwood's angry letter (9 yrs ago now) to the editors of the Junior OED on the removal of nature words from the latest edition I've been intrigued by the connection between our language and what we know/don't know about parts of our world.

I have a couple of books by biologist and professor David George Haskell on my shelf. The Forest Unseen is a poetic description of a plot of ground in the forest around Sewanee in Tennessee. Had the chance to hear him read excerpts and have been meaning to get back to this for a while. And The Songs of Trees, a poetic meditation on interconnectedness through a biologist's eyes.

Loved his book Sounds Wild and Unbroken so I'm looking forward to getting back to these.

Getting back to reading poetry and I will probably start with Camille T Dungy's anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.

The lost words is on my to read list, and I enjoyed what I read of Camille T. Dungy's Black Nature anthology. I haven't read Amy Tan's book about birding, so I'm adding it to the stack.


I think the only book I've recently read that fits on this list is Jamaica Kincaid's Encyclopedia of gardening for colored children, a book with lovely illustrations by Kara Walker that is definitely for adults. Entries cover a variety of plants, including breadfruit, cotton, daffodils, and sugar cane.

>4 WelshBookworm: The Lost Words sounds amazing. I did not know the backstory. Interesting that one of the expunged words was Wren, that's my niece's name. I'll have to get a copy.

>8 markon: How intriguing!

I've just finished The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle. Recommended!

I HIGHLY recommend Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer! Thanks for this thread. I love books about nature and our relationship to it.

I HIGHLY recommend Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer! Thanks for this thread. I love books about nature and our relationship to it.

I've got The Serviceberry on hold at the library - should come soon. I enjoyed Braiding Sweetgrass, I suspect I'll like this one too.

I listened to The Serviceberry this past weekend (it's really an extended essay, so was under 2 hours). It was very interesting.

Read and reviewed The Serviceberry (review on the book page). I haven't read Braiding Sweetgrass, but am not motivated to read it now after reading this latest book from Kimmerer.

I do want to read The Lost Words, and have for sometime.

>4 WelshBookworm: I'll have to read that book, too.

I've just finished The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. There's an audio version read by the author, but get this one in paper for the illustrations.

I read and enjoyed Christian Cooper’s memoir, Better living through birding, for the April Nature kit: flying creatures on the 2025 Category Challenge’s list. The words just flow, charting his introduction to birding as a child, family camping trips to national parks, growing up knowing he was gay and hiding it, and his two escapes – the natural world & fantasy and science fiction. A self-described BLERD (black nerd), he’s earned a living as a science writer and a comics writer. In 2023 he hosted a show that can be streamed on Apple TV or Amazon, Extraordinary Birder. I especially liked his joys of birding, scattered throughout the book.

Next on my list is Slow birding by Joan Strassmann, about enjoying the birds in our own back yards. I don’t expect to finish it this month, but I hope to browse my way through it and some of the activities it suggests. I’ve got a robin nesting on my downspout right now.

The winner of the inaugural 2025 Climate Fiction prize has been selected: And so I roar by Abi Daré (author of The girl with the louding voice.)

The short list for the prize included the winner and the following titles.

• The ministry of time Kaliane Bradley


• Briefly very beautiful Roz Dineen


• Orbital Samantha Harvey


• The morningside Tea Obrecht

>20 markon: As I liked The Girl with the Louding Voice more than some, I am happy to see a relatively obscure author receive such a prize. However, I am surprised that it is a climate fiction prize. The first book in the series gave no inclination that the sequel would encompass that topic.

I haven't read Girl with a louding voice. A plot synopsis on this one says that "The novel follows fourteen-year-old Adunni from her life in Lagos, where she is excited to finally enroll in school, to her home village where she is summoned to face charges for events that are in fact caused by climate change." Another synopsis paints Tia, the woman Adunni is staying with in Lagos, as the main character, having to chooses between protecting Adunni and finding out a secret her dying mother has hidden from her.

Has anyone read The great displacement by Jake Bittle? I have just started and am finding it quite readable. I guess this is the first time I've seen someone state so baldly that climate change is here, and it is already displacing people in the US.

>23 markon: I read it earlier this year as noted in >11 qebo:. What makes it readable IMO is the focus on personal stories, navigating all the frustrating entanglements with e.g. housing policy and insurance.

Some books on the Royal Society (UK) Trivedi Science Book Prize longlist have relevant themes
https://royalsociety.org/news/2025/08/shortlist-2025-royal-society-trivedi-scien...

Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and our Future (Oneworld) by Neil Shubin
Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Allen Lane, Penguin) by Sadiah Qureshi
Your Life is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better (Faber & Faber) by Tim Minshall

BTW, Your Life Is Manufactured seems to be the same book (a new edition? I can't tell) as How Things Are Made. I got the latter from the library, YLIM seems to be newer. The descriptions on Amazon are similar/identical.

Thanks Rasdhar. I am also interested in The forbidden garden of Leningrad, having read a novel based on this situation (Hunger, by Elise Blackwell) several years ago.

The shortlists for the 2025 Wainwright Prize were published earlier this month. Link is given because there are six categories - three for adults, three for children.