'One of the most striking and poignant picture books of the season.this giant tome contains not only beautiful illustrations but a haunting series of poems that read like a summoning back of the wild.a book in which every page seems like an act of love.' - Herald The Lost Words is a beautiful book and an important one.' - Observer 'Sumptuous.a book combining meticulous wordcraft with exquisite illustrations deftly restores language describing the natural world to the children's lexicon. the poems or nature summoning spells are indebted to Gerard Manley Hopkins with rich alliteration, word-play and compound adjectives the illustrations make plants and creatures luminous against backgrounds of gold leaf.' - The Sunday Times The Lost Words is that book - a work that has already cast its extraordinary spell on hundreds of thousands of people and begun a grass-roots movement to re-wild childhood across Britain, Europe, and North America.'Sumptuously illustrated.

By the magic of word and paint, they sought to summon these words again into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike, and to celebrate the wonder and importance of everyday nature. Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a “spell book” that will conjure back twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. The news of these substitutions - the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual - became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail.

The list of these “lost words” included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary - widely used in schools around the world - was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped.

From bestselling Landmarks author Robert Macfarlane and acclaimed artist and author Jackie Morris, a beautiful collection of poems and illustrations to help readers rediscover the magic of the natural world.

The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane