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7 books match the query 'Mitchell, John Hanson'

cover of Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile

Ceremonial Time

Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile

John Hanson Mitchell

University Press of New England, 2013

“Ceremonial time” occurs when past, present, and future can be perceived simultaneously. Experienced only rarely, usually during ritual dance, this escape from linear time is the vehicle for John Mitchell’s extraordinary writing. In this, his most magical book, he traces the life of a single square mile in New England, from the last ice age through years of human history, including bear shamans, colonists, witches, local farmers, and encroaching industrial “parks.”
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cover of Legends of the Common Stream

Legends of the Common Stream

John Hanson Mitchell

University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

For over twenty years, John Hanson Mitchell has visited Beaver Brook almost daily. This small, slow-flowing Massachusetts stream was of vital importance for early settlers and an indispensable resource for the Native peoples who lived and fished along its shores, but it has been largely forgotten in our own time. Revisiting the river's oxbows, bends, and marshes over the course of a year, Legends of the Common Stream combines a natural history of Beaver Brook with a study of the people who lived on this land and a meandering, but stunning, examination of the myths and legends that can help us to better understand humanity's relationship to the natural world.

While Mitchell never leaves the brook's shores, he draws from a range of traditions and takes readers on excursions to regions and cultures across the globe and across time, making the case that our contemporary separation from nature goes hand in hand with our alienation from the world of myth. This book seeks to restore these broken relationships and offers the reminder that while cultures may come and go, the stream goes on forever.
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cover of Living at the End of Time: Two Years in a Tiny House

Living at the End of Time

Two Years in a Tiny House

John Hanson Mitchell

University Press of New England, 2014

In this second book in his Scratch Flat Chronicles, John Hanson Mitchell tells how he set out to recreate Henry David Thoreau’s two years at Walden Pond in a replica of Thoreau’s cabin. Mitchell lived off the grid, without running water or electricity, in a tiny house not half a mile from a major highway and in the shadow of a massive new computer company. Nevertheless, his contact with wildlife, the changing seasons, and the natural world equaled and even surpassed Thoreau’s. Hugely popular with the international community of Thoreau followers when it was first published, this book will now be essential reading for the growing community of people who are interested in living in a tiny house, fully experiencing the natural world, or finding self-sufficiency in an increasingly plugged-in society.
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cover of The Garden at the End of Time: Getting By in the Age of Climate Change

The Garden at the End of Time

Getting By in the Age of Climate Change

John Hanson Mitchell

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

John Hanson Mitchell has long written about his garden outside of Boston, and about the plants and animals with whom he shares this land. In 2022, the United Nations and others started reporting the true severity of the climate crisis as the Earth passed a point of no return. All across the globe it was the worst year on record for climate-related disasters, including extinctions, deadly floods, massive fires, and dramatic droughts, all of which have worsened since that year. Mitchell, like so many, felt overwhelmed. He looked to the story of Voltaire’s Candide, and settled on the famous aphorism from that book: “We must cultivate our garden.”

The Garden at the End of Time features Mitchell’s trademark blend of science, literature, and anecdote as he processes both the information he is reading from various sources and what it prompts him to do in his own small corner of the world. The story that unfolds is one of Mitchell diversifying his plantings; fighting what he sees as unnecessary local development; walking through and observing changes in the wild lands nearby; continuing to read the news from around the world; and meditating on other moments, real and imagined, when people sought refuge even as they did their part to improve a personally and collectively stressful situation. 

Readers discover the impossibility of separating gardening from global warming, while also seeing the solace that exposure to plants can offer, in addition to their contribution to carbon consumption. With gravitas, kindness, and wit, Mitchell offers a model for maintaining a connection to nature even as it reels from manmade threats.  

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cover of The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness

The Wildest Place on Earth

Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness

John Hanson Mitchell

University Press of New England, 2015

This is the ironic story of how Italian Renaissance and Baroque gardens encouraged the preservation of the American wilderness and ultimately fostered the creation of the world’s first national park system. Told via Mitchell’s sometimes disastrous and humorous travels—from the gardens of southern Italy up through Tuscany and the lake island gardens—the book is filled with history, folklore, myths, and legends of Western Europe, including a detailed history of the labyrinth, a common element in Renaissance gardens. In his attempt to understand the Italian garden in detail, Mitchell set out to create one on his own property—with a labyrinth.
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cover of Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land

Trespassing

An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land

John Hanson Mitchell

University Press of New England, 2015

Trespassing, “a thoughtful, beautifully written addition to environmental and regional literature” (Kirkus Reviews), is a historical survey of the evolution of private ownership of land, concentrating on the various land uses of a 500-acre tract of land over a 350-year period. What began as wild land controlled periodically by various Native American tribes became British crown land after 1654, then private property under US law, and finally common land again in the late twentieth century. Mitchell considers every aspect of the important issue of land ownership and explores how our attitudes toward land have changed over the centuries.
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cover of Walking Towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place

Walking Towards Walden

A Pilgrimage in Search of Place

John Hanson Mitchell

University Press of New England, 2015

Walking Towards Walden is an exploration of the sense of place, what it means, how it developed, and why it matters. Based on an eighteenth-century literary device in which a group of friends undertake a walking tour and discuss a certain subject, this wide-ranging story emerges from the author’s fifteen-mile bushwhack through woods, backyards, and marshes—from a hilltop in Westford, Massachusetts, to the town of Concord, Massachusetts—trespassing all along the way. A mock epic, complete with encounters with armed mercenaries and vicious dogs, the book covers all the aspects of place—art, literature, myth, and even music.
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