The Keeping of the Land: Songs, Canticles, and Vigils for Common Ground Hardcover – February 9, 2026

The Keeping of the Land is a reflective cycle of songs, vigils, canticles, and spoken pieces rooted in the living landscapes of Britain.Written over many years, the book moves slowly through woods, moorland, fields, hedgerows, churchyards, and margins, attending to trees, plants, and fungi not as symbols or resources, but as presences — each bound to season, place, and consequence. The work listens rather than instructs, asking what it means to notice without claiming, to remember without possession, and to stand witness without turning the land into metaphor alone.At its heart are encounters that shaped the author’s understanding of care and restraint: the guarded ground of the Lady’s Slipper orchid; ancient oaks struck down by chance; the Sycamore Gap tree, once assumed permanent and then suddenly gone; fungi that heal, nourish, intoxicate, and undo. Alongside these are more familiar companions — birch, hawthorn, apple, elder, nettle, foxglove — each held in its complexity, where beauty and danger are never separated.The texts are accompanied by original illustrations that give as much weight to space as to form. Images and words share the page carefully, allowing room for breath, silence, and the reader’s own attention. Nothing here rushes. Nothing is named without consideration.This is not a field guide, nor a book of folklore in the traditional sense. It does not offer remedies, promises, or moral instruction. Instead, it proposes a different relationship with the living world: one grounded in humility, patience, and responsibility.The Keeping of the Land is a book for readers drawn to nature writing, poetry, ecology, and place — and for anyone who suspects that to guard a thing is sometimes to refuse it entirely. Read more