These exquisite mini essays reflect on the natural landscape, the changing seasons, village life, art, poetry, the stories that ancient churches tell, the Christian year. They refresh ones vision of ones own daily routine and surroundings and can be read over and over again, like poetry.

Canterbury Press is proud to have acquired these backlist Ronald Blythe titles, consisting of illustrated collections of the authors regular weekly column on the back page of the Church Times where, with a poets eye, he observes the comings and goings of the rural world he sees from his ancient farmhouse in the South of England. Each volume was critically acclaimed on publication.

Concern about the 'decline of community', and the theme of 'community spirit', are internationally widespread in the modern world. The English past has featured many representations of declining community, expressed by those who lamented its loss in quite different periods and in diverse genres. This book analyses how community spirit and the passing of community have been described in the past – whether for good or ill – with an eye to modern issues, such as the so-called 'loneliness epidemic' or the social consequences of alternative structures of community. It does this through examination of authors such as Thomas Hardy, James Wentworth Day, Adrian Bell and H.E. Bates, by appraising detective fiction writers, analysing parish magazines, considering the letter writing of the parish poor in the 18th and 19th centuries, and through the depictions of realist landscape painters such as George Morland. K. D. M. Snell addresses modern social concerns, showing how many current preoccupations had earlier precedents. In presenting past representations of declining communities, and the way these affected individuals of very different political persuasions, the book draws out lessons and examples from the past about what community has meant hitherto, setting into context modern predicaments and judgements about 'spirits of community' today.

For most of human history, we have lived our daily lives in a close relationship with the land. Yet now, for the first time, more people are living in urban rather than rural areas, bringing about an estrangement. This book, by acclaimed author Jules Pretty, is fundamentally about our relationship with nature, animals and places. A series of interlinked essays leads readers on a voyage that weaves through the themes of connection and estrangement between humans and nature. The journey shows how our modern lifestyles and economies would need six or eight Earths if the entire worlds population adopted our profligate ways. Pretty shows that we are rendering our own world inhospitable and so risk losing what it means to be human: unless we make substantial changes, Gaia threatens to become Grendel. Ultimately, however, the book offers glimpses of an optimistic future for humanity, in the very face of climate change and pending global environmental catastrophe.

This publication continues Ronald Blythe's celebrated Word from Wormingford, though with a difference. For here, a village record moves further into the personal life of a writer who is not only a working part of the small community to which he has belonged for so many years, but who in many respects is isolated from it. Intimacy and distance are revealed as having their contrasting places in this both imaginative interpretation of the English countryside at the close of the 20th century.

With reverence and love, Britain’s most admired rural writer chronicles daily life in the Stour valley village, finding beauty and significance in its sheer ordinariness as well as in its many literary, artistic and historic associations. The year takes its shape from the seasons of nature and the feasts and festivals of the Christian year. Each informs and illuminates the other in this loving celebration of nature’s gifts and neighbourly friendship. Literature, poetry, spirituality and memory all merge to create an exquisite series of stories of our times. These delightful essays first appeared in the ‘Word From Wormingford’ column, a popular back page feature of the Church Times for some 20 years. It was praised as one of the finest journalistic columns by the Guardian in November 2012.

From the author of the acclimed and much-loved Waterlogand Wildwood. For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks in which he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations. Discursive, personal and often impassioned, they reveal the way he saw the world, whether it be observing the teeming ecosystem that was Walnut Tree Farm, thinking about the wider environment, walking in his fields or on Mellis Common, or quietly contemplating his past and present life. Notes From Walnut Tree Farmcollects the very best of these writings, capturing Roger's extraordinary, restless curiosity into the natural and human worlds, his love of literature and music, his knack for making unusual and apposite connections, and of course his distinct and subversive charm and humour. Together they cohere to present a passionate, engaged and - in spite of the worst pressures of contemporary life - optimistic view of our changing world.

A meditation on the painter John Nash's old home.

Blythe's reflection on a lifetime in gardening.