Title: Hill Country Harvest
Author: Hal Borland
Date: 1967
Publisher: J.B. Lippincott
ISBN: none, but click here to see it on Amazon
Length: 377 pages
Quote: “An editor…forty miles or so up the Housatonic valley from where I live, asked me to write a weekly column for his daily newspaper. ‘What about?’ I asked. ‘Nature,’ he said, ‘the outdoors, life in general.’”
Ten years later, Borland and his book publisher looked back over his columns and decided, “We’ve got a book.” This is the book.
Borland’s home was farther west, but he had married a native of New England, and this book is about New England. It’s about the Appalachian foothills rather than the Atlantic seacoast, which may explain why the book was read and enjoyed here, too. The similarities and differences between our hill countries are interesting.
New Englanders are hereby invited to keep up the consideration of a question Borland raised after reading an old book about New England : “It is observed by the Indians that every tenth year there is little nor no winter.” Borland had not observed this, but if any readers in New England observe it I hope they’ll keep the rest of us posted. Of course, the old book was written “about 330 years” before some point between 1956 and 1967, when Borland was writing about it. Between 1625 and 1640 the English in America were still stumbling around in confusion. They were aiming for Virginia when they struck Massachusetts and it’s possible that Borland’s misinformant, one William Wood, thought he was in Massachusetts when he was actually in Virginia .
That was the topic of one column. There are dozens. There are columns about the behavior of Borland’s squirrels (he was able to attract red squirrels and gray squirrels to the same feeder), about the origins of Groundhog Day, about why the grass greens and the flowers bloom earlier above the septic tank. There’s an explanation of why Weather Service reports started including “wind-chill factors” and why the thermometer on your porch is likely to run a few degrees colder than the one at the local weather station. There are observations of towhees and ground-ivy and lilacs and country people who whistle in public. There are complaints about rhubarb and salsify…people who dutifully ate those two New England classics never complained about zucchini. And so on.
If Borland had meticulously noted the date of each of his observations of nature and listed them in chronological order, his book might have seemed bloggier and less like a novel than it does, but he would also have been practicing “phenology,” the scientific observation of shifts in natural cycles from year to year. Bloggers who keep methodical phenological records are helping professional ecologists with tasks like proving or disproving theories such as global warming. Borland was not a really meticulous phenologist, but he came close enough to give Hill Country Harvest some real scientific and historical value.
In short, Hill Country Harvest is a fun read, often comic, never very sad, often informative…warmly recommended.
Posted on September 8, 2015 Categories Book, Green Tags Appalachian Mountains, nature notes
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