Donald Culross Peattie

Flowering Earth is an extraordinary work in which Peattie explores the origin and significance of plant life with an unmatched sense of astonishment and reflection. According to The New York Times, his prose in Flowering Earth “is pervaded by a continuous sense of beauty and illuminative insight,” and Books hails it as a piece “for people who are refreshed by any sort of emancipation from the trivial…”

Flowering Earth

Noel Peattie

"In a humble and modern-minded fashion, I am by belief a sort of Franciscan. At least, I am reverent where he was, and that is before all that is great and lasting, all that is little and beautiful, in Nature... Where his swift spirit leaped in praise, I come stumbling, asking the curious questions of the naturalist"--from Foreword.

A Cup of Sky

"Even a diehard urbanite would likely be seduced by this extraordinary chronicle of the plant kingdom... " —Publishers Weekly "... much more than the fascinating story of plant life... It is also a book about the resilience of life itself, the mystery and power of the unseen energy appearing in the visible world in a marvelous variety of forms." —Audubon Naturalist News "Here is Mr. Peattie at his superb best.... [H]e makes the story of botany and its pursuit as fascinating to the reader as it is to him, and the reading of it a delight." —Hartford Times "[Peattie] belongs with Gilbert White, Thoreau, John Burroughs, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jeffries, and John Muir." —Mark van Doren First published in 1939, this beautifully imaginative book is about botany much in the same sense that Walden is about a pond. Part natural history, part biography, and part philosophical reflection, Flowering Earth is written in a warm, lyrical style that made poet-scientist Donald Culross Peattie one of America's best-known naturalist writers.

version française

Audubon, fils de France et d'Amérique

In Green Laurels, Donald Culross Peattie combines his extensive knowledge of history's foremost naturalists with his personal observations about the subject to form what the New York Herald Tribune calls "a delightful book...one would not wish to miss on any account." This piece is accurate and precise but according to Nation, "there is not a line which is not dramatically vivid and entertaining." Peattie’s enthusiasm and enlightened curiosity make Green Laurels appealing to readers of all backgrounds.

The Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists

Green Laurels

A Book of Hours contains 24 essays, one for each hour of the day, that seek to bridge the gap between definitive scientific philosophy and the sheer unadulterated beauty that Donald Culross Peattie envisioned within everyday life. The Boston Transcript referred to this collection as “science, in sheer poetry,” and the Chicago Daily Tribune mused that “it leaves one a better man for having read it” and offers “the inevitableness of natural laws and the truth of beauty, if one cares to seek it.”

A Book of Hours

The Road of a Naturalist is a fascinating autobiographical wonder written by one of America's most beloved naturalists at the height of his fame. A scientist, a philosopher, and a poet, Donald Culross Peattie takes us on an confessional journey across the landscape of his life. Told in flashbacks of years past and interspersed with impressions of a journey by motorcar across the American West, it is intensely personal. It is American in the best sense of the word. From saying goodbye to the trees at his childhood home on Lake Michigan to a man formed via Harvard and New York City, finally discovering a belief in the nature of things in a cabin in the Grand Tentons, it is not told as as linear life story but rather an adventure in living, in science, in thought.

The Road of a Naturalist

An Almanac for Moderns contains a short essay for each day of the year that contemplates a unique but factual aspect of unbridled nature. According to a review in Nation, this collection of essays manages to “appeal to the ordinary lover of nature . . . but the turn of Peattie’s mind is poetic and speculative.” The New York Times calls this book “a fine and subtle perception . . . rising at times to an intense lyric beauty . . . a book which the reader will deeply treasure, and to which he will repeatedly return.”

An Almanac for Moderns

Gives the economic facts regarding the great stands of timber of western North America and identifies over two hundred species of tree

A Natural History of Western Trees

Gives the economic facts regarding the trees of northeastern North America and identifies a wide variety of species

A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America

An informative overview of more than one hundred different tree species describes their physical characteristics, ranges, and the role they played in the history of America.

A Natural History of North American Trees

"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.

Donald Culross Peattie

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