Wild Fruits by Bradley P. Dean

Today's book recommendation: Wild Fruits: Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript Hardcover by Henry David Thoreau and edited by Bradley P. Dean

Thoreau's Walden (1854) is regarded both as a masterpiece of American prose and as a forerunner of modern environmentalism. Its author spent much of the 1850s learning what botany could teach him about the New England woods he chronicled. Thoreau brought that knowledge to bear on this sometimes very beautiful essay about plants, fruits and nuts, left incomplete at his death in 1862 and here printed for the first time.

Thoreau's brief preface to Wild Fruits begins where Walden left off: ""What are all the oranges imported into England to the hips and haws in her hedges?"
This book is arranged by fruit: beginning with elm-fruit (""most mistake the fruit before it falls for leaves, and we owe to it the first deepening of the shadows in our streets""), and proceeds through several dozen entries to sassafras, skunk cabbage, strawberries, cranberries, juniper berries and, finally, "winter fruits."