In 1992, the archaeologists Francis and Maisie Pryor acquired a large field in a remote corner of the Lincolnshire fens. The soil was exhausted by half a century of intensive cultivation; yet within a few years, Francis and Maisie would build a home here, and transform an arable desert into a haven for plants, people and wildlife. Taking their inspiration from different elements of the English gardening tradition, they set about creating a garden that was ambitious in scope but human in scale.

A Fenland Garden is shot through with the empirical wisdom of a writer with a special relationship with landscape and the soil. Francis’s account of the garden at Inley Drove is counterpointed by nuggets of fenland lore, by walks in the woods with the dogs Pen and Baldwin, and by vignettes of the plantsman’s trials and tribulations. Above all, this is the story of bringing something beautiful into being, of embedding a garden in its local landscape, and reclaiming for nature a small patch of English ground.

Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2023 for Nature Writing

‘Exquisite, luminous and quietly radical . . . utterly unique and refreshing’ Lucy Jones

Where nothing grows, moss is the spark that triggers new life. Embarking on a journey though landscape, memory and recovery, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett explores this mysterious, ancient marvel of the plant world, meditating on and renaming her favourite mosses – from Glowflake to Little Loss – and drawing inspiration from place, people and language itself.

‘Fascinating, subtle and risk-taking . . . Poetry, descriptive-evocative prose, memory, memoir, natural history and more all drift and mingle in strikingly new ways’ Robert Macfarlane

‘Magnificent’ Guardian

‘Remarkable ? A compact classic!’ Bill McKibben

‘I learned something new – and found something amazing – on every page’ Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

Fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries are the earth’s most desirable and dependable resources. Here, Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment, and their systemic destruction in the pursuit of profit. Travelling from the fens of sixteenth-century England to America’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Fen, Bog and Swamp is both a revelatory history and an urgent plea for wetland reclamation, from one of our greatest prose stylists.

‘A rousing call to action’ Esquire

‘Sparklingly furious ? it has a profoundly positive message’ Richard Mabey, Telegraph

‘This haunting tribute ? is a pleasure to read’ Financial Times

‘A fascinating, subtle and risk-taking book’ Robert Macfarlane

Glowflake, Rocket, Small Skies, Kind Spears, Marilyn . . . Moss is known as the living carpet but if you look really closely, it contains its own irrepressible light.

In Twelve Words for Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett celebrates the unsung hero of the plant world with a unique blend of poetry, nature writing and memoir.

Making her way through wetlands from Somerset to County Tyrone, Burnett discovers the hidden vibrancy and luminous beauty of these overlooked places. She also takes strength from them as she recovers from her grief at her father’s death. As she meditates on and renames her favourite species of moss, she finds a healing power in language, and draws inspiration from the resilience and tenacity of her plant – and human – friends.

‘Burnett stretches the limits of prose, infusing it with poetic intensity to create a powerful, original voice’ Guardian

‘A subject that could not be more important. A compact classic!’ Bill McKibben

‘I learned something new – and found something amazing – on every page’ Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx – whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth – comes an urgent and riveting history of wetlands, their ecological role and how the loss of them threatens the planet.

Fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries are the earth’s most desirable and dependable resources, and in four illuminating parts Proulx documents the emergence of their systemic destruction in the pursuit of profit and the consequent release of their stored carbon. Wide-ranging and idiosyncratic, Proulx’s explanation of wetlands takes readers to the fens of sixteenth-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay Lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire and America’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and introduces the nineteenth-century explorers who launched the ravaging of the Amazon rainforest.

Proulx was born in the 1930s, a time, as she says, when ‘in the ever-continuing name of progress, Western countries busily raped their own and other countries of minerals, timber, fish and wildlife.’ Fen, Bog & Swamp is both a revelatory history and an urgent plea for wetland reclamation from a writer whose passionate devotion to observing and preserving the environment is on glorious display.

‘Magnificent, bringing to life hitherto overlooked habitats’ Guardian

‘Proulx’s sparkling book will open your eyes to humanity’s reckless trashing of wetlands’ Telegraph

‘A haunting tribute ? Proulx’s poetic description of these places, and peat itself, is a pleasure to read’ Financial Times

**LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2021**

‘A real page-turner … a warning about what happens when the rich and powerful dress up their avarice as “progress” – a lesson we could do with learning today.’  Dixe Wills, BBC Countryfile magazine

FROM A MULTI-AWARD-WINNING HISTORIAN, AN ARRESTING NEW HISTORY OF THE BATTLE FOR THE FENS.

Between the English Civil Wars and the mid-Victorian period, the proud indigenous population of the Fens of eastern England fought to preserve their homeland against an expanding empire. After centuries of resistance, their culture and community were destroyed, along with their wetland home – England’s last lowland wilderness. But this was no simple triumph of technology over nature – it was the consequence of a newly centralised and militarised state, which enriched the few while impoverishing the many.

In this colourful and evocative history, James Boyce brings to life not only colonial masters such as Oliver Cromwell and the Dukes of Bedford but also the defiant ‘Fennish’ them- selves and their dangerous and often bloody resistance to the enclosing landowners. We learn of the eels so plentiful they became a kind of medieval currency; the games of ‘Fen football’ that were often a cover for sabotage of the drainage works; and the destruction of a bountiful ecosystem that had sustained the Fennish for thousands of years and which meant that they did not have to submit in order to survive.

Masterfully argued and imbued with a keen sense of place, Imperial Mud reimagines not just the history of the Fens, but the history and identity of the English people.