Macfarlane found that a children’s dictionary had cut words like acorn, bluebell, and kingfisher to make room for broadband and cut-and-paste, and this book is his answer. Nine chapters, each on a landscape and a writer who saw it clearly — Nan Shepherd on the Cairngorms, Roger Deakin on water, J.A. Baker on the Essex marshes — and between them, glossaries. Thousands of terms in Gaelic, Norn, Welsh, Cornish, and English dialects for particular conditions of land, water, light, and weather: A word for the sun-path on water, a word for a hollow where a hare lies. The argument is that when you lose the word you stop seeing the thing. My response to his call for a “word hoard” is the Wild Word section here on Field Notes. I’m all in on this one.