This wonderful book is both a practical and philosophical field guide to the natural gifts of the American countryside. The final harvest of our great nature writer's last years, Wild Fruits presents Thoreau's distinctly American gospel -- a sacramental vision of nature in which "the tension between Thoreau the naturalist and Thoreau the missionary for nature's wonders invigorates nearly every page" (Time). In transcribing the 150-year-old manuscript's cryptic handwriting and complex notations, Thoreau specialist Bradley P. Dean has performed a "heroic feat of decipherment" (Booklist) to bring this great work to light. Readers will discover "passages that reach for the transcendentalist ideal of writing new Scriptures, yet grounding this Bible in a vision of practical ecology" (Boston magazine). Wild Fruits is beautifully illustrated throughout with line drawings of the natural life Thoreau considered on his walks. - Back cover.