Nature/Science

From the Coke and Mentos fountain makers who found initial fame via Maker Faire and YouTube (more than 150 million views!) comes this collection of DIY science projects guaranteed to inspire a love of experimentation. Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, also known as EepyBird, share their favorite projects: a giant air vortex cannon, a leaf blower hovercraft, a paper airplane that will fly forever, and many more. Each experiment features instructions that will take users from amateur to showman level—there’s something here for all skill levels—alongside illustrations, photographs, and carefully explained science. How to Build a Hovercraft is guaranteed to engage curious minds and create brag-worthy results!

Right in the heart of one of the nation’s most densely populated urban areas sits an idyllic realm of graceful meadows, dense woods, placid lakes, and fresh air. Brooklyn’s 585-acre Prospect Park offers a rural refuge to thousands of visitors every day.

Finally, a smart way for gardeners to store their treasured seed packets. With envelopes for two different sizes of packets, space to record important details—such as date purchased, date planted, and yearly weather conditions—and beautiful color illustrations, the Seed Keeper neatly arranges seeds to keep gardeners organized through the seasons.

Featuring colorful beach umbrellas and dreamy blue horizons, this beautiful oversized book offers a breath of fresh air and evokes fantasies of Mediterranean travel. Photographer Christian Chaize returned many times over the course of eight years to shoot an intimate beach in the south of Portugal from the same vantage point.

Whether located in the heart of a metropolis such as Chicago or on sprawling fields in the countryside, sculpture parks and gardens have become increasingly popular destinations for art and nature lovers alike.

This enchanting tour of America’s most cherished birds and flowers is an intimate collection of lovely images from beloved letterpress studio Dutch Door Press. Each state’s emblematic flora and fauna are paired in winsome vintage-inspired compositions and accompanied by fascinating facts about the states, the plant and animal species, and how they came to symbolize their regions.

Nelson Byrd Woltz’s award-winning landscape architecture is widely celebrated for combining sheer beauty with ecologically regenerative design. The firm’s innovative and highly collaborative design methods bring depleted ecosystems back to life—restoring meadows, streams, woodlands, and ponds in urban and rural settings and cultivating connections between sites and their complex regional environments.

From their early use as protective shelter to the felling of thousands of trees to harvest wood and create farmland, to more recent attempts at conservation, trees remain one of mankind’s greatest resources.

Nothing enlivens a room like a touch of nature. Taking the terrarium trend to the next level, this stunning guide will inspire crafters, garden lovers, and décor fans to turn flowers, leaves, and branches into striking, organic décor. Acclaimed designer and stylist Shane Powers presents 20 simple yet arresting projects for bringing natural tranquility to any space.

In this latest collection, Andrew Zuckerman, beloved photographer of Creature and Bird, moves from fauna to flora, turning his lens onto the most beautiful specimens of the plant kingdom. Spectacular close-up images of 150 flower species, both exotic and familiar, are lovingly captured in Zuckerman’s bold yet sensitive signature style. Showcased against pure white backgrounds, the complexity of color and structure in each specimen is revealed—creating flower portraits of astonishing radiance and detail.

A science book like no other, The Where, the Why, and the How turns loose 75 of today’s hottest artists onto life’s vast questions, from how we got here to where we are going. Inside these pages some of the biggest (and smallest) mysteries of the natural world are explained in essays by real working scientists, which are then illustrated by artists given free rein to be as literal or as imaginative as they like. The result is a celebration of the wonder that inspires every new discovery. Featuring work by such contemporary luminaries as Lisa Congdon, Jen Corace, Neil Farber, Susie Ghahremani, Jeremyville, Jon Klassen, Jacob Magraw, and many more, this is a work of scientific and artistic exploration to pique the interest of both the intellectually and imaginatively curious.

Gem and Stone celebrates 50 different gems ranging from timeless classics like diamond and emerald to exotic beauties such as lapis lazuli, peridot, and even petrified wood. Altman’s photographs capture the splendor of each gem alongside brief text highlighting the stones’ chemical makeups, metaphysical properties, and associated folklore throughout human history.

Gardeners and foodies will enjoy eating with the seasons and admiring fetching art with this set of 12 gorgeous prints to display.

Wave watchers around the world know that no two waves are the same. Yet each and every wave that rises, peaks, and crashes onto the beach is generated by a much larger force originating thousands of miles away.

Orchids can bloom year after year. In this essential guide, Bruce Rogers, “The Orchid Whisperer,” shares his expert tips from more than three decades of breeding and growing orchids.

America’s Other Audubon chronicles the story of Genevieve Jones, her family, and the making of an extraordinary nineteenth-century book, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio. At the age of twenty-nine, Genevieve Jones, an amateur naturalist/artist and daughter of a country doctor, visited the 1876 Centennial World's Fair in Philadelphia, where she saw Audubon's paintings in Birds of America on display. His artwork inspired her to undertake the production of a book illustrating the birds’ nests and eggs that Audubon neglected to include in his work.

Of the ten million or so different species of insects on our planet, none is more fascinating than the honeybee. Magnified hundreds to thousands of times with a high resolution scanning electron microscope, honeybees become architectural masterpieces—an elegant fusion of form and function.

Within the pages of this wordless title, an inventive mouse that is inspired by birds and aircraft shows creativity in turning a sheet of paper into a flying pinwheel.

Rising from the depths of the North Pacific lies a fabled island, now submerged just 15 feet below the surface of the ocean. Rumors and warnings about Cortes Bank abound, but among big wave surfers, this legendary rock is famous for one simple (and massive) reason: this is the home of the biggest rideable wave on the face of the earth.

You won’t find Echo Beach on any map. But for a band of surfers from Newport Beach the stretch between 52nd and 56th street was an entire universe of ‘80s cool. These Day-Glo surfers singlehandedly demolished the laid-back ‘70s style with a loud blast of Devo and attitude. Out of the water, they wore Aquanet pompadours, Wayfarers, and neon boardshorts. In the water, they ripped up the wave two feet from local photographer Mike Moir’s Canon fish eye.

Post Secret meets World War Z in this chilling vision of the fallout following a global zombie pandemic. A gradual mutation of a virulent strain of “super flu” gives rise to millions of the undead, who quickly overwhelm treatment facilities and swarm cities around the world, leaving survivors on their own against a legion of the infected.

When they’re not buzzing in our ears or ruining our picnics, flies have lives of their own. Until now, their tiny world has remained completely unknown to humankind. In this engaging study, photographer Magnus Muhr carefully documents the world of the common housefly and reveals that when we’re not around, flies behave pretty much like we do.

The nature-inspired designs of beloved artist Jill Bliss are instantly recognizable for their colorful interplay of dots, lines, and shapes. Infused with art and tips throughout, this take-along journal offers basic techniques for drawing natural objects....

Sharon Beals' gorgeous photographs of nests offer a new window onto the life and beauty of birds. Drawn from the collections of the California Academy of Sciences, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley, and the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Z...

The perfect incentive for keeping your head in the clouds, The Cloud Collector's Handbook is a whimsical guide to the wonders of the sky. Throughout, author and cloud expert Gavin Pretor-Pinney catalogs a variety of clouds and gives readers point...

Flower delivery! Featuring five amazing pop-up bouquets, Paper Blossoms brings floral cheer to any room. Display any of the bouquetsa garland of roses, a tropical arrangement, a lotus watergarden, a springtime bouquet, or a vase of liliesas a b...

In the summer of 2008, exactly forty years after French student activists took to the streets with their rallying cry of "Under the pavement, the beach!" a new vision of liberation took shape in the courtyard of MoMA's P.S.1. Designed and built by WORK Ar...

Of the ten million or so different species of insects on our planet, none is more fascinating than the honeybee. One of the oldest forms of animal life still in existence from the Neolithic Age, bees have been worshipped and mythologized since the beginni...

You have now before you a representation of one of the most richly coloured of birds, and one whose history is in some degree peculiar.John James Audubon, The Birds of AmericaA spotted wren perches on the limb of a pin...

In this completely revised and updated classic, beloved garden expert Pat Welsh shares how to garden the organic way. This latest edition includes 40 new color photographs; a simple month-by-month format that shows gardeners exactly what to do throughout...

Turning his camera to the world of birds, Andrew Zuckerman has created a new body of work showcasing more than 200 stunning photographs of nearly 75 different species. These winged creaturesfrom exotic parrots to everyday sparrows, and endangered penguin...