Still Spring Garden in December

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Familiar plants and hardscapes take on a different mood under a light coating of snow. Visitors to the garden are always welcome.

A very readable book published in 2020 is What It's Like To Be A Bird, by David Allen Sibley, the author and illustrator of the series of Sibley's nature guides. Each essay in this book focuses on a particular detail of bird biology. For instance, Hermit Thrush songs "use pitches that are mathematically related by simple ratios, and follow the same harmonic series as human music. The harmonic series is a fact of physics, and not a creation of human culture..The fundamentals of music are rooted in nature and have a very basic, even instinctive, appeal."