Essays On Nature, Ecology, Western America

Landscapes of the Interior: Re-Explorations of Nature and the Human Spirit

Science & Math

Gayton, Don

Nature & Ecology

New Society Pub

Trade Paperback. Nature/Environment/Land Use. Landscapes of the Interior is an eloquent to the separation that people are feeling between themselves and nature. Its seventeen essays take the reader on a unique journey that plumbs the depths of the human connection with nature.

Travel

New Society Publishers

The wheatgrass mechanism: Science and imagination in the Western Canadian landscape

Fifth House Publishers

The Sky and the Patio: An Ecology of Home

Biological Sciences

New Star Books

Don Gayton's collection of beautifully written and passionate essays has earned him many enthusiastic fans since its first publication in 1990. In The Wheatgrass Mechanism, he writes about the industrialization of our western landscapes and the exploitation of our resources, and tells how the North American prairie has become the most extensively altered biome on the planet. He brings a scientist's understanding to our common landscapes and explores them in a language that is supple and evocative for the lay reader. There is a strong environmental message in The Wheatgrass Mechanism, but this is not just another "how-to-save-the-planet" book. Gayton goes beyond simple analysis and concern into the realms of culture and myth, attempting to strike a balance between science and imagination that will help us restore our bonds with the Earth.

Wheatgrass Mechanism: Science and Imagination in the Western Canadian Landscape

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd

Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose In the Garden begins with an intimate look at Don Gayton in his BC garden with his dog Spud. Striking a series of premises - the first one being that gardening is essentially an irrational act - he logically and humorously begins to unravel the work and rituals of gardening. Engaging the reader with real gardening experiences, Gayton takes us on the microscopic steps of a gardening season and his interest in ecological succession. While commenting on the inter-reliance of species, types of soil, why weeds invade, how foreign planets appear, insects, disease and frost, he also speculates on gardeners -- their needs to landscape, to purchase specialized tools, to use chemicals, to emotionally bond with trees, shrubs, flowers and vegetables. 
The "back story" of Interwoven Wild is much more universal. In it Gayton uses his experiences as a working field ecologist to place the garden in the larger context of our present natural world. By interlocking artists such as Monet and Caravaggio; writers such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Emily Dickenson, and Ann Dowden; park designer Frederick Law Olmstead, and landscape architect Christopher Alexander, Gayton reminds us that the garden has long held sway in the creative consciousness. His brief excursions into history, whether tracing the apple back to Kazakhstan, explaining how the tulip made its way from Turkey to Holland, or how the industrialist Baylock's introduction of a smuggled Asian cherry tree destroyed the BC cherry orchids fascinate as well as instruct. For Gayton, the garden is a primordial human urge -- a gift, celebration, and revelation buried in human psyche, marked in our collective mythologies --a kind of magical glue binding world culture, science and economics.

Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden

Literature & Fiction

World Literature

Thistledown Press

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Books by Gayton, Don