John Hanson Mitchell: 10 books

Here is a book to enhance our appreciation of the small citizens of the world and to introduce us to the neighbors we never knew we had, from spotted salamanders to meadow voles, from snowy tree crickets to ambrosia beetles, all living within steps of your door. “If there is grass and a few...

Twenty-five years ago John Hanson Mitchell cut down a 1 1/2-acre stand of seventy-five-year-old white pines and planted a garden in their place. An Eden of Sorts is a history of the plants and animals that lived on the tract over the next decades. In a survey he made before taking down the...

In this second book in his Scratch Flat Chronicles, John Hanson Mitchell tells how he set out to recreate Henry David Thoreau’s two years at Walden Pond in a replica of Thoreau’s cabin. Mitchell lived off the grid, without running water or electricity, in a tiny house not half a mile from a major...

Author John Hanson Mitchell recounts a marathon bicycle trek from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides, tracing solar myths, sun cults, birds, and flowering plants all along the way.

This is the ironic story of how Italian Renaissance and Baroque gardens encouraged the preservation of the American wilderness and ultimately fostered the creation of the world’s first national park system. Told via Mitchell’s sometimes disastrous and humorous travels—from the gardens of southern...

Trespassing, “a thoughtful, beautifully written addition to environmental and regional literature” (Kirkus Reviews), is a historical survey of the evolution of private ownership of land, concentrating on the various land uses of a 500-acre tract of land over a 350-year period. What began as wild...

Looking for Mr. Gilbert is an account of the quest to uncover the heretofore unknown life of Robert A. Gilbert, an African American serving man who worked for the ornithologist William Brewster. A man of many talents, Gilbert went on to become the first African American landscape photographer.

This memoir of the author’s brief sojourn working at a café and auberge in Corsica is populated with a questionable group of locals, fugitives, and escapists during the Algerian and Vietnam Wars.

Walking Towards Walden is an exploration of the sense of place, what it means, how it developed, and why it matters. Based on an eighteenth-century literary device in which a group of friends undertake a walking tour and discuss a certain subject, this wide-ranging story emerges from the author’s...

In 1928, Massachusetts water authorities began land takings for the largest public works project in the United States at the time, the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir, in the Swift River Valley. What the authorities did not realize was that, living in the more remote, forested tracts of the...