Nature audiobooks page 5

Making a Rock Garden
A short look at building a rock garden, right from the rocks themselves and how to arrange them, to choosing and placing the plants, touching wall and bog gardens, too. In this little monograph, the author is trying to draw the eyes of U.S. gardeners in to the intimate beauty of this neglected hobby.

The original work has a number of attractive and useful photographs and drawings.
Ten Common Trees
These are short sketches of ten common trees found in North America -- Black Willow, American Elm, Apple Tree, Horse-Chestnut, Birch, White Oak, Chestnut, Walnut, Cone Bearers, Red Maple. The simple writing style makes the book suitable to be used in schools.

Our Vanishing Wild Life

We are weary of witnessing the greed, selfishness and cruelty of “civilized” man toward the wild creatures of the earth. We are sick of tales of slaughter and pictures of carnage. It is time for a sweeping Reformation; and that is precisely what we now demand. -William Temple Hornaday

Birds in the Calendar

Delightful sketches of British wild birds – a bird for every month of the year from the pheasant in January to the robin in December. This collection of articles, reprinted in book form from the periodical The Outlook, is full of fascinating information about bird behaviour and habitat, as well as many interesting anecdotes.

Out of date in some respects, particularly in its reference to the (now illegal) collecting of birds’ eggs, this book brings home forcefully how the populations of some British wild birds have declined since it was written.

The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets
Located in a part of Cumbria that was once part of Lancashire, the River Duddon rises in the high fells of the Lake District and flows for 25 miles through varied scenery before disappearing into the sands between Millom and Barrow-in-Furness. Wordsworth’s series of sonnets, inspired by his walks along the river, were written over a period of years, but are arranged so as to follow its downward course from the fells to the sea.

Part One of this reading consists of the 33 sonnets and postscript that were first published as a series in 1820. Later editions of Wordsworth’s works included a 34th sonnet, which is appended to Part One.

Part Two contains Wordsworth’s rath...
Birds and All Nature, Vol. V, No 1, January 1899
"Birds and All Nature" was a monthly publication of the Nature Study Publishing Company of Chicago. It includes short poems and brief descriptions of birds, animals and other natural subjects with accompanying color plates. The magazine was published from 1897-1907 under the various titles, "Birds," "Birds and all Nature," "Nature and Art" and "Birds and Nature."

Flowers and Ferns in their Haunts
Pleasant non-fiction journey into the backwoods of the New England coastal countryside by the first president of the Connecticut Audubon Society, circa 1900.
The Romance of Rubber

This pamphlet was published in the early 20th century by the United States Rubber Company so that “coming generations of our country … have some understanding of the importance of rubber in our every day life… We believe the rubber industry will be better off if the future citizens of our country know more about it.” Learn about Christopher Columbus’s discovery of rubber, how the crafty British entrepreneur, Wickham, managed to smuggle rubber seedlings out of Brazil, and how rubber manufacturing came to be a “peculiarly American industry.” The myriad uses of rubber from a century ago are also elaborated in considerable detail – everything from submarines to Keds to dentures.

Poems: Series One

Renowned poet Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) wrote many many poems. This collection, “Poems: Series One”, presents the first installment of the complete poetic works of Miss Emily Dickinson. It is broken into four parts: Life, Love, Nature, and Time and Eternity.

The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called “the Poetry of the Portfolio,”–something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer’s own mind. The poetry found here is then entirely honest, and indicative of the authors true feelings.

Story Book of Science
The famed French naturalist Fabre covers a large variety of subjects in these 70 short but fascinating essays about insects, animals and nature in general. The translator explains in her foreword, "The young in heart and the pure in heart of whatever age will find themselves drawn to this incomparable story-teller, this reverent reveler of the awe-inspiring secrets of nature. The identity of the "Uncle Paul," who in this book and others of the series plays the story-teller's part, is not hard to guess; and the young people who gather about him to listen to his true stories from wood and field, from brook and hilltop, from distant ocean and adjacent millpond, are, without doubt, the author...