Odes & Nightingales (illustrated words on nature)

Odes and Nightingales is a gift book showing the language we use, to describe the natural world. Words like petrichor (the earthy smell of rain) to murmuration (aerial dances of starlings). In Japan there is ‘forest-bathing’, and in Norway there is ‘Friluftsliv’ whih translates as ‘free-air life’ when connecting with nature.

The natural world has inspired poets and writers through the centuries, and the phrases used are often what we bring to mind: Wordsworth ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’, Keats wrote his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Shakespeare ‘compared his muse to a summer’s day’.

Find extracts from some of our best loved nature poets and writers in including Robert Burns, Tennyson, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë.

Discover words from around the world including Inuit words for snow, to Japanese blossom viewing parties. And even the Icelandic custom of closing the office early on a sunny day!

Robert Tuesley Anderson is a writer, poet and editor living in the Southern Uplands of Scotland.