Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book shows the social, cultural and historical importance of plants and their role in both formal and folk medicine. Herbs have been used for centuries to cure all manner of ailments. They were especially imp...

A beautiful reproduction of naturalist Mark Catesby's flora and fauna illustrations of North America and the Caribbean. Mark Catesby was an eighteenth-century naturalist and artist whose work on the natural history of North America and the Caribbean...

An informative introduction exploring our fascination with shells, complete with stunningly reproduced illustrations. In 1811, architect, stone mason, and shell obsessive George Perry published his lavishly illustrated volume, "Conchology or the Nat...

A richly illustrated volume, which reproduces one of the finest collections of eighteenth-century ornithological art in its entirety. In 1786, Austrian natural history artist Ferdinand Bauer traveled to Italy and the Levant. The watercolors he creat...

Reynard - a subversive, dashing, anarchic, aristocratic, witty fox from the watery lowlands of medieval East Flanders - is in trouble. He has been summoned to the court of King Noble the Lion, charged with all manner of crimes and misdemeanours. How...

From its roots in ancient Greek herbal medicine, the popular spirit we now know as gin was established by the Dutch in the sixteenth century as a juniper-infused tincture to cure fevers. It gained notoriety during the London 'gin craze' in the eighte...

Thomas Hardy notes the thrush's "full-hearted evensong of joy illimited", Gilbert White observes how swallows sweep through the air but swifts "dash round in circles" and Rachel Carson watches sanderlings at the ocean's edge, scurrying "across the be...