Sundial of the Seasons, Hal Borland 1964

Another delightful nature book using the calendar as its framework.  In this case, Borland chose 365 selections from his more than 1200 ‘nature editorials’ published in The New York Times between 1941-1963. Every day has its entry with styles and content varying widely but always engaging, illuminating, and charming.  What could have been cloyingly sentimental is actually a beautiful paeon to nature, time and its cycles, and man’s relationship to both.  Borland provides wonderfully specific details (e.g. spring advances north at 17 miles/day except where altitude reduces its rate to 100 vertical feet/day.) Writing from a hill-and-valley farm in the Connecticut Berkshires, he focuses on nature’s rhythms, water and wind’s inexorable remaking of the environment, and the plants, birds, and animals who share our planet while meshing the countryman’s cycle of work with nature’s.  This book elevated my consciousness of Mt. Ascutney’s dawn and the stars’ movements through the seasons.  Worth dipping into through the coming years.