Your evening walk will never be the same once you come to know the quiet giants that line the city's streets.

Experience the ancient roots and enduring natural beauty of New York as never before. New York City, once a lush and verdant group of forested islands, is still home to a rich collection of diverse tree species, each with a story to tell about the city’s past. This gorgeous book by naturalist and photographer Benjamin Swett offers stunning color photographs, personal narratives, and fascinating historical observations about a select few of the thousands of trees that thrive in the five boroughs—from the sprawling New York Botanical Garden in spring bloom to the snow-laden residential blocks of Queens in winter. Swett’s warm and welcome voice adds depth and perspective to his collection, as well as an unmistakable charm unique to his city’s cosmopolitan character. The stories of these trees—some dating back to the Revolutionary era and before—link the living with the past in a visceral and engaging way that will leave readers with a renewed and lasting appreciation of their own environments. This book is a new edition to New York City of Trees.

Leopold’s botanical descriptions for each species include a summary of its key identification characteristics and extensive information on its leaves, flowers, fruit, winter characteristics, and bark. Additional material is provided on each tree’s habit, habitat and range, and uses, including wood properties and value, landscaping, and restoration projects. Also provided are summer keys to each genus and numerous other aids to identifying these species. Line drawings depict the many fine diagnostic characteristics of each species. Of the 350 color photographs, those of bark should readily facilitate field identification of mature specimens of most tree species. Color photos show the beautiful ornamental attributes that make so many native species excellent landscape choices. This book offers much to both the tree novice and the expert, casual and accomplished outdoor enthusiasts alike.

New York City's municipal water supply system provides about 1 billion gallons of drinking water a day to over 8.5 million people in New York City and about 1 million people living in nearby Westchester, Putnam, Ulster, and Orange counties. The combined water supply system includes 19 reservoirs and three controlled lakes with a total storage capacity of approximately 580 billion gallons. The city's Watershed Protection Program is intended to maintain and enhance the high quality of these surface water sources. Review of the New York City Watershed Protection Program assesses the efficacy and future of New York City's watershed management activities. The report identifies program areas that may require future change or action, including continued efforts to address turbidity and responding to changes in reservoir water quality as a result of climate change.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the essential role of trees and forests in cities and examines the creative approaches cities around the world are taking to protect trees and expand their urban forests. Moving beyond the view that trees are luxuries and therefore non-essential to the life of a city, the book examines urban tree policies and approaches that foster tree protection, including tree codes and bylaws, and calls for greater community engagement to preserve this important facet of urban life. Through an international range of examples and case studies, featuring cities in the United States, Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, France, New Zealand, Mexico, Sierra Leone, and the United Kingdom. The book offers best practice examples where trees have been further integrated into the fabric of urban planning and design, including forested towers, interior rainforests, tiny urban forests, and metropolitan forests. Written by a leading authority in the field, this is a fascinating read for researchers, students, and practitioners in urban planning, landscape architecture, and environmental policy and planning.

“Far-ranging and deeply researched, Urban Forests reveals the beauty and significance of the trees around us.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction “Jonnes extols the many contributions that trees make to city life and celebrates the men and women who stood up for America’s city trees over the past two centuries. . . . An authoritative account.” —Gerard Helferich, The Wall Street Journal “We all know that trees can make streets look prettier. But in her new book Urban Forests, Jill Jonnes explains how they make them safer as well.” —Sara Begley, Time Magazine A celebration of urban trees and the Americans—presidents, plant explorers, visionaries, citizen activists, scientists, nurserymen, and tree nerds—whose arboreal passions have shaped and ornamented the nation’s cities, from Jefferson’s day to the present As nature’s largest and longest-lived creations, trees play an extraordinarily important role in our cities; they are living landmarks that define space, cool the air, soothe our psyches, and connect us to nature and our past. Today, four-fifths of Americans live in or near urban areas, surrounded by millions of trees of hundreds of different species. Despite their ubiquity and familiarity, most of us take trees for granted and know little of their fascinating natural history or remarkable civic virtues. Jill Jonnes’s Urban Forests tells the captivating stories of the founding mothers and fathers of urban forestry, in addition to those arboreal advocates presently using the latest technologies to illuminate the value of trees to public health and to our urban infrastructure. The book examines such questions as the character of American urban forests and the effect that tree-rich landscaping might have on commerce, crime, and human well-being. For amateur botanists, urbanists, environmentalists, and policymakers, Urban Forests will be a revelation of one of the greatest, most productive, and most beautiful of our natural resources.

The author tracks his Scots-Irish roots from the Irish Sea kingdom of Dal Riata in the 500's to McGee's Town (Balmaghie), Scotland in the 900's and on to McGee's, Colorado in the 1880's. He writes of his ancestors as they immigrate to America, participate in the Westward Movement, fight in the Civil War, experience the gold rushes of Colorado, the Great Depression, World War II and more recent events. The impact of these events on one family and its descendents is the story of America. History sings to us from the pages of this book.

George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History VSNY Book Award, New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America Hornblower Award for a First Book, New York Society Library James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic With pigs roaming the streets and cows foraging in the Battery, antebellum Manhattan would have been unrecognizable to inhabitants of today’s sprawling metropolis. Fruits and vegetables came from small market gardens in the city, and manure piled high on streets and docks was gold to nearby farmers. But as Catherine McNeur reveals in this environmental history of Gotham, a battle to control the boundaries between city and country was already being waged, and the winners would take dramatic steps to outlaw New York’s wild side. “[A] fine book which make[s] a real contribution to urban biography.” —Joseph Rykwert, Times Literary Supplement “Tells an odd story in lively prose...The city McNeur depicts in Taming Manhattan is the pestiferous obverse of the belle epoque city of Henry James and Edith Wharton that sits comfortably in many imaginations...[Taming Manhattan] is a smart book that engages in the old fashioned business of trying to harvest lessons for the present from the past.” —Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times