Why am I passionate about this?

"Ut pictura poesis", as goes painting so goes poetry is a pithy phrase that sums up the truth that a picture is mute poetry and poetry is a speaking picture. I have studied the history of this tradition from many angles and I have derived from it the term “lyrical naturalism” which I use to discover what is charming or captivating in the world of plants. As an art historian, well-read in European literature, I regard myself as a member of the environmental humanities which increasingly is the home of many academics eager to participate in the great debate on how to honor the natural world in literature and art before it is too late.


I wrote

Woodland Imagery in Northern Art, c. 1500 - 1800: Poetry and Ecology

By Leopoldine Prosperetti,

Book cover of Woodland Imagery in Northern Art, c. 1500 - 1800: Poetry and Ecology

What is my book about?

Woodland Imagery instills a sense of a “lyrical naturalism” that reconnects the reader to the natural world as it was…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Tree

Leopoldine Prosperetti Why did I love this book?

This booklet is thin, smaller than a kindle, and small enough to fit in an outer pocket or any small bag. I bought my copy in 2011 and ever since I have given copies of the booklet to those who would connect with his ideas about trees. He wants us to forget the trimmed apple trees of his father, and urges us to fall in love with the overgrown trees in a scrap of ancient woods in the English countryside. He hated Victorian botanists for their passion for naming and classification. He sounds like a heretic when he takes on Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the Swedish botanist, who continues to be famous for the binomial system for naming all the plants in the Vegetable Kingdom. He actually takes his readers to Uppsala, the university town in Sweden where Linnaeus was a professor, to underscore what he calls the “bitter fruit of the Uppsalan tree.” By naming a tree, Fowles writes, we stop looking at it. That is the original sin! His unorthodox views inspired me to discern in the woods of the Old Masters - Titian, Ruisdael, Rubens, and Claude Lorrain - not a collection of named trees, but a celebration of sylvan beauty. In fact, I consider the essays in my book the direct descendants of Fowles’s observations in a little book that by now is truly an evergreen.

By John Fowles,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Tree as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

John Fowles' writing life was dominated by trees. From the orchards of his childhood in suburban Essex,to the woodlands of wartime Devon, to his later life on the Dorset coast, trees filled his imagination and enriched his many acclaimed and best-selling novels.Told through his lifelong relationship with trees, blending autobiography, literary criticism, philosophy and nature writing, The Tree is a masterly, powerful work that laid the literary foundations for nature-as-memoir, a genre which has seen recent flourishings in Roger Deakin's Wildwood, Richard Mabey's Nature Cure, Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways and Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk.As lyrical and precise…


Book cover of Silent Spring

Leopoldine Prosperetti Why did I love this book?

I read her book as a child, and it never left my memory. I was drawn to her “Fable of Tomorrow,” which she used to set the stage, and which became unforgettable in her readers’ minds. It launched the environmental movement. It is a literary device that inspired me in the writing of my essays, which at times take on the character of a fable.

By Rachel Carson,

Why should I read it?

11 authors picked Silent Spring as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. "Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller, with international reverberations . . . [It is] well crafted, fearless and succinct . . . Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters" (Peter Matthiessen, for Time"s 100 Most Influential People of the Century). This fortieth anniversary edition celebrates Rachel Carson"s watershed…


Book cover of The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

Leopoldine Prosperetti Why did I love this book?

This is another book that permanently perches on my shoulder. It is a masterpiece by a visionary author that helped me to explore the mythic origins of shrubs and trees in early societies. The book inspired me to write essays on the hazel and the hawthorn, their early blossoms as manifestations of the power of the mysterious white mantle spread by the White Goddess in Celtic lands, in contradistinction to the Aphrodite as the goddess of all that is green in the Mediterranean.

By Robert Graves,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The White Goddess as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The definitive edition of one of the more extraordinary and influential books of our time

This labyrinthine and extraordinary book, first published more than sixty years ago, was the outcome of Robert Graves's vast reading and curious research into strange territories of folklore, mythology, religion, and magic. Erudite and impassioned, it is a scholar-poet's quest for the meaning of European myths, a polemic about the relations between man and woman, and also an intensely personal document in which Graves explores the sources of his own inspiration and, as he believed, all true poetry.
Incorporating all of Graves's final revisions, his…


Book cover of The Overstory

Leopoldine Prosperetti Why did I love this book?

This book makes a powerful case for the sentience of trees and that trees experience injury and use their underground networks to send messages to each other. This magnificent novel describes the plight of trees, not as a lumberjack’s problem, but as an earth-shattering tragedy that impacts the lives of its nine major characters in dramatic ways. The title is also an allusion to the upper canopy as a place for humans to live before lowering down to the midstory, and finally, the shrubby understory of a tree. I welcomed the book as a bellwether for a growing interest on the part of non-academic readers for books that connect with nature and tell us the story of earth from a dendrological point of view.

By Richard Powers,

Why should I read it?

32 authors picked The Overstory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…


Book cover of The Metamorphoses

Leopoldine Prosperetti Why did I love this book?

There is no book as rich in tree imagery as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is a book of fables many of which are about trees. Best known, I believe, is the story of Apollo and Daphne, in which a nymph is transformed into a laurel tree. The fable that I use in the book is the story of Pan and Syrinx, painted collaboratively by Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder. It explains the mythical origins of the sedges and reeds that fringe the riverbanks.

By Ovid, Hendrik Goltzius (illustrator), A.S. Kline (translator)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Metamorphoses as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Metamorphoses - Ovid. A translation into English prose by A. S. Kline. Published in entirety with mythological index and illustrations by Hendrik Goltzius.

In the Metamorphoses Ovid retells stories from the Greek myths, arranging them in roughly chronological order, from the origins of the world to his own times. His charming and graceful versions, full of life and interest, express his humanist approach, his feeling for pathos, and his endless curiosity and delight in human affairs. Each tale involves a transformation of some kind, and the whole collection provided a potent source of motifs and images for later art,…


Explore my book 😀

Woodland Imagery in Northern Art, c. 1500 - 1800: Poetry and Ecology

By Leopoldine Prosperetti,

Book cover of Woodland Imagery in Northern Art, c. 1500 - 1800: Poetry and Ecology

What is my book about?

Woodland Imagery instills a sense of a “lyrical naturalism” that reconnects the reader to the natural world as it was before the industrial revolution. Twelve essays explore the copses and “frothing hedges,” and other features of the woodland ecosystem as pleasing landmarks that make their appearance in nature, poetry, and art. The chapters include the story of Albrecht Dürer’s love of linden trees, and reveal Jan van Eyck’s boastful conviction that art trumps nature in creating visions of a “new earth.” Other essays tell the stories of Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel, Jan Brueghel the Elder and other masters of sylvan beauty gathered together as never before between the covers of a single, lavish volume.

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What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

By Sharman Apt Russell,

Book cover of What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

Sharman Apt Russell Author Of Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Explorer Runner Mother

Sharman's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks left by browsing deer, predatory weasels, and inquisitive bears, skunks, and raccoons. Master tracker Kim A Cabrera provides photos and illustrations.

Winner of the prestigious John Burroughs Medal, Russell also writes about community, a sense of place, and a renewed connection with the nonhuman world. She explores the health of…

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

By Sharman Apt Russell,

What is this book about?

Did a red fox pass this way? Could that be a bobcat print there in the dirt? Do those tracks belong to a domestic dog or a coyote? Combining lyrical memoir with an introduction to wildlife tracking, What Walks This Way explores the joys of learning to recognize the traces of the creatures with whom we share our world.

The nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife-mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice-near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. With wit and compassion, she guides readers through…


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Interested in trees, pesticide, and nature?

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Nature 158 books