 Hello again. A recent question about what is my favourite book has inspired me to create a whole another series of little films about different books that I love and all to do with the permaculture of course and some of them will be quite old books and you'll know that they're popular with me because of the state they're in and some of them will be rather newer and so what I've decided to do for this particular little video is to show you three that I've come across this year which I really like so they all look quite nice and clean and new still but these have inspired me very much this year so I'm going to start with this one Peter Vollerman presumably his book The Hidden Life of Trees. Now this is a book that I'd heard about a couple of places and I was already quite familiar with trees and such so I was thinking well maybe it's just another one of those books that will tell me things that I already know but actually this one was fascinating from the the moment of opening the the cover and starting to delve in and I highly recommend this is just a book for anybody who loves anything to do with nature but trees in particular it really reveals a whole layer of things that go on below the surface and it's not a book that has many pictures it has a few little sketch drawings of trees occasionally but as you can see it's essentially text but the text is fascinating so that's my first choice. The second choice was a book that in May I was teaching a design course in Warwickshire and the mother of the woman who was hosting the course came up to me with a book and she said oh you must read this and and I was I thought oh yes another book of course and and so I just took note of it and I did actually borrow it briefly but I was so busy fixing up a bicycle that I didn't get around to reading it but I took a mental note and then I got home and one of the emails I had was also about this book somebody had been writing about the book and then I opened my post and my cousin had sent me an article which was this one here now my cousin hardly ever writes to me at all you know so to get something from her was quite surprising and it was all about the farm which is written about in the book so I thought okay I need to get the book so I did and the book in question that you may also have come across is this one and this is the hardback presumably by now you can get the soft cover which would be a bit cheaper of course and it's called wilding and for me I've been familiar with the rewilding movement for a few years it's very inspiring but of course one of the challenges is we humans were quite tasty and so we don't like to see big predators in the landscape hence the reason for many of them being hunted to extinction and we've become more and more aware of the consequences of that in the overall ecosystem because once you take away that top-level predators then you have to then manage the animals that they would eat and of course many of those animals we've been farming but what's been very what's particularly interesting about this book is that it's all about a farm that was previously dairy and arable in Sussex about half an hour's drive from London in fact not very far from where I grew up curiously three and a half thousand acres now for many of us most of us three and a half thousand acres is way beyond the the land that one would ever get to look after and yet what's interesting is that many wildlife reserves are much smaller than this and there are consequences to that whenever we look at scale some things need to be bigger and wild animals wild herbivores need enough space to move through the landscape to allow the land to recover behind them to leave the parasite eggs and someone behind them and to and through that process create new habitats and so what's occurred the story that's told in this book which for me is fascinating and also inspirational it gives me hope is that they're a dairy farm and an arable farm and they basically couldn't afford to run anymore because of financial constraints it just wasn't profitable and so they to cut a long story short took out all the internal fences put a big fence around the outside and just basically put in some grazing animals that were as close as possible to the wild versions of those that we farm today so some deer and pigs and horses wild kind of horses and cattle and so on and and basically stood back and see what happens and it's all about the birds that came back the butterflies and the insect life and the plants that come in and so on it just tells the story of the transformation of this habitat and for me this is just really inspiring to see that can still be happening and that people with that much land are actually willing will take the risk to step back and see what happens so for me this is a fascinating book very inspiring and a brilliant read so my third choice those two very much about nature and human intervention with nature the third book is rather different kind of book but again perhaps this is a good gift for somebody who's quite practical I'm quite a practical person I like to make things this is the permaculture book of DIY and why I particularly like this is that for many years there's been solutions there's a solutions page in Permaculture magazine and people will tell you how to make a pallet bench or how to make a pig arc or whatever it is and they've all been all the best ones been put together basically into one book so they'll all be easy to find rather than buried in a big pile of magazine somewhere and yes so this is anything from simple projects like making things from pallets right through to towards the end there's you know Bendors-Bentwood chairs and natural swimming pools which are really just an introduction those little articles at the back are really introductions to those things which are described in much more detail in their own books but many of these projects it's it's a book that's full of pictures well and information how to make things the 12 volt solar power thing that's an excellent book as well you need to be a fairly technical person but it's all about how to turn anything to run on 12 volts homemade paints and reciprocal roofing compost solar heating stuff to do with a woolen and blankets my favorite one is the self-watering container garden and this basically tells you how to put some plumbing together in the boxes and basically so that the water plants can always wick up the water from underneath and it's controlled by float valve and they all just look like really nice plant beds but you can go away for weeks at a time and your plants are basically watering themselves as long as there's enough water in the water but of course all your containing these perhaps it needs to be bigger where you are so yes some excellent an excellent book full of ideas very inspiring quite practical and and definitely one for somebody with a practical bent so in terms of these three I would say fascinating inspiring and I think probably I would say empowering something there for everyone