Bringing Nature to Life - Eight Recommended Introductory Natural Living Books

Recommended a few natural living books for reading during breaks. These books are rich in beautiful illustrations, and the text is concise and elegant, making them easy to read and relaxing for the body and mind.

They are: Kyoto Mountain Life, In the Wild with Bugs, My Little French Meal, The Secret of Fruit, Introductory Watercolor Illustrations - Botanical Flowers, Japanese Traditional Colors, Living with Less Sugar, and Dried Flower Floral Art to Make Your Room More Beautiful.

These books illustrate different aspects of incorporating nature into your life, combining museum knowledge, action guides, and creative inspiration.

Many of the ways I have practiced and gained beauty and peace of mind from. I'll briefly outline my own reasons for recommending them, and also offer some introductory advice on how to quickly add color to your life and open the door to the vastness of nature without having to make a big deal out of it.

If you are interested in a particular area, you can refer to the action guide to get started as soon as possible and begin your own journey of discovery. It's not recommended to seek out everything, after all, our energy is limited. Yet by all means, find a way to connect with nature, for nature is the only pure land where our minds can dwell in peace.

This is a collection of essays on mountain living.

The author, an English aristocrat, met her now-husband (and the book's photographer) in Japan, and together they settled in a century-old farmhouse in the countryside of Kyoto, Japan, where the author created a garden and planted more than one hundred and fifty kinds of herbs.

This book documents the author's poetic life with herbs, interspersed with records of beautiful moments and philosophical experiences in life.

Summer days quiet days long, hear the sound of mint, basil, rosemary, lavender ------ growing vigorously; autumn of the seven grasses swaying in the wind at the time of the season, with the ancient method of making herbal tea, making handmade soap, brewing plum wine. Idle time in the mist-shrouded early morning step deep in the field, with the twilight of the river to watch the flow of fireflies point.

The author observes the differences between life in Japan and life in Britain, and we can follow her as she sees the differences in the details of her life and her perceptions.

In the age of globalization and the Internet, everyone, like the author, is exploring an ever-changing world. Trying to discover the beauty of the world no matter where you are, and actively searching for a way of life that suits you are the key spiritual lessons of this book for me.

1, buy herb pots: rosemary, thyme and basil

2, drink herbal tea: rosemary + rose

3, purchase a bottle of single essential oils, choose the flavor you like, and put it into a humidifier

4, fry a steak once with thyme: /recipe/100051307/ (pro-tested delicious steak frying, pay attention to steak thickness)

5. Observe basil blooming, wait for bees to visit, harvest basil seeds and plant them the next year

6. Make a green sauce with basil once

This is a collection of insect-watching essays. The author is an insect enthusiast and writer. The book records the author's experiences and philosophical feelings of observing and photographing insects, coordinated in Yunnan. The first half of the book is in prose, and the second half is a record of photographs and time taken.

This is how the author explains the title of the book

Being in the wilderness is a gesture, an escape, an escape from the box. This gesture allows me to give up my entangled ego in a flash, to disappear into nature, to become one with nature, to become a flower when I look at a flower, to become an insect when I look at an insect, as if the sky and the earth were small, and my mind was open and atmospheric, and all my worries were blown away by the mountain wind.

Watching insects is not simply to meet the curiosity of the heart, and boys catch bugs to scare female classmates, or in order to catch crickets for the competition is very different. It is a humble, pure, aesthetic look at nature. Let go of your own frame and arrogance, and blend in to feel the vastness and beauty of the world.

I was surprised by the charm of a fly, which gave me a different aesthetic. It crawls out of the dung heap and flies around obnoxiously, "buzzing" in pursuit of something dirty and smelly ------ However, it also stays on the banana leaf after the rain, making one suddenly realize: can our eyes look at the world filter out preconceptions, simply observe it and discover its extraordinary beauty beyond the dirty and smelly

Keeping plants means being with these people, and being with them, and being with them. > Keeping plants means being around these little elves. In the face of pests, such as aphids, red spiders you want to kill them. With bees, lacewings, ladybugs (meat-eaters) and the like, you're delighted. However, you can only see them in their true form from a pragmatic and anthropocentric point of view, and they are just as much a miraculous creation of nature as they are of mankind.

1. Keep a plant, always in the open air. Morning and evening to observe it, perhaps you will find some magical little life uninvited.

2. If you can, have a macro camera and you will marvel at the amazing structures of insects. Or buy a macro lens for your cell phone, of course the phone itself is great even better. You'll realize that your home is really more than just yourself.

3. Keep a nature observation journal and observe a plant.

4, more walks in nature, parks suburbs, with a purpose to observe, record the changes in this place throughout the year

5, you can purchase ladybug eggs in the summer, observe its life cycle, if the plant grows aphids is a must.

This book was procured because I watched Rachel Qiu's Parisian Kitchen (which is available on B-site). Loved Rachel's attitude when she cooks, life needs that kind of swagger sometimes, simple, a little rough around the edges, but creative and confident.

The author, Rachel Khoo, is British, studied at the world's top cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu in France, and has opened the smallest private kitchen in Paris in the middle of her tiny apartment, dedicated to cooking French meals at home in a modern and easy-to-master way, proving that French meals are no longer a luxury that can only be enjoyed in fine dining restaurants. It's a proof that French cuisine is no longer a luxury that can only be enjoyed in fine dining restaurants.

This is a cookbook of insights. Each dish, created by the author with seasonal ingredients in mind, is a blend of tradition and modernity. As the author says about Parisian cuisine:

Simplicity, adaptability and understanding of the ingredients are key

This is the philosophy of the book.

The dishes in this book are difficult to reproduce exactly as the recipes, firstly because the ingredients are not easy to obtain, and then the seasonings, which can be sourced but the chances of reusing them are low. But as the author's philosophy generally goes, what we are also trying to do is to combine traditional cooking methods with fresh local ingredients. Chinese seasonings and ingredients paired with a French approach may result in completely fresh flavors, which of course have the potential to be either a delicacy or a purgatory. The important thing is to return to the ingredients themselves, to the seasons and seasonality, to one's own palate and feelings, rather than obsessing over the differences between Chinese, Western and Japanese food. Mix and match carefully, and with constant experimentation, you will create recipes that are uniquely your own.

1, buy an oven, procurement of cheese and butter

2, mix a salad, high color is a prerequisite, pay attention to the color scheme

3, baked once in the oven green Jim fish: /recipe/106079238/ (pro-tested tasty recipes)

4, the procurement of a steamer with a snow flat pan, really good for cooking light Cooking. A pot in the hands of Western and Japanese food can be.

5, with the oven grill, you can roast sweet potatoes, roast chestnuts, roast lamb kebabs, grilled shrimp.

This is a watercolor museum illustrations, is "Shingkou Man's hand-painted nature illustrations" series of a book, this series of a **** there are seven books, seems to be only five published, I have purchased, but the most favorite is still this book, "Fruit Secrets", because of the love of eating fruit.

The author is a famous naturalist, graduated from Chiba University, majoring in biology, nicknamed "Mr. Mantis Lizard".

I like the style of this book, watercolor and signature pen, the painting style is dry and realistic, original composition, bright colors. The book is not only about fruits, but also about animals and insects. The book is very interesting to read, and it always provokes my impulse to do some research on Shanghai's ingredients. Especially recently, the development of online shopping, greatly enriched the diversity of the ingredients category, just orange there are more than a dozen kinds, morphology, appearance, seasonal and so on are not the same, so people are very eager to in-depth research.

1, observe the natural food you often eat, record its specific name (origin + varieties + listing time), as the Northeast is also trying to learn: not all leafy greens are called bok choy.

2, if you can to your favorite food, draw a sketch or a watercolor or take a big close-up. You will find it very different from what you usually see.

3, to understand the local food, it is best to go to the origin of a turn, to understand the life cycle of the food

This is a watercolor flower introductory book, the flowers in it in accordance with the seasonal order, each of which has a painting process, the painting method is simple and fresh, you only need to prepare the basic materials can follow the author to start the four seasons of flowers journey.

The author, Shiro Fujikawa, was originally an editor of a gardening magazine, and after turning thirty-five, he became interested in painting and writing while painting.

It is precisely because plants do not move or express emotions on their own that the more you look at them, the more you feel that they are trying to express something

After trying a lot of painting materials, I still feel that watercolor is the most poetic and the most life-like. I always feel that computerized painting is not suitable for expressing the beauty of life, and it seems to lack the spirit and freedom of breath. Watercolor is the easiest to learn and start with, but it's harder to advance. Like Chinese painting, watercolor is very suitable for writing and expression of inner feelings, do not describe the form, just simply observe the water color is also very beautiful.

The painting method in the book, regardless of whether or not they have learned to paint can quickly get started, in fact, everyone will paint, but after learning a lot of techniques and knowledge, you will find that they suddenly do not paint. Let go of the obsession with technology do not have to obsess about precipitation, halo, superimposed color, white and so on, just need to focus on the contour and color is good.

Once you start painting, forget that the object you are painting is a flower. Because once you've decided that you're painting a flower, then you're only painting the flower in your head.

Forget about what you are painting, focus on observation, don't be bound by the name, the important thing is to feel the nature and the beauty of the form.

1, buy a box of watercolors, three watercolor pencils, a watercolor book

2, randomly find a flower, whether it is a wildflower on the roadside or home raised, or go to the florist to buy. Learn how to draw from the book while observing and exploring the form (outline and color variations) of the flower at hand.

3, according to the four seasons to collect flowers around you (parks, suburbs, roadsides, etc.), take photos to record, and use watercolor to explore the photos.

4. Put a set of picture frames on the wall, paint according to the seasons, and put them in the frames to enjoy.

This is a cultural color book, both literary and historical, that introduces the names, allusions, and imagery of traditional Japanese colors. Traditional colors are colors based on Japanese people's unique feelings about color, and most of their color names are taken from plants, animals, and natural phenomena, which are poetic and beautiful, unlike European and American watercolors, which are mostly named after their ingredients, such as quinacridone gold, light titanium yellow, and chrome sky blue.

The author of this book, Yoko Nagasawa, is an expert in traditional Japanese colors, and in this book she skillfully combines the Japanese seasons with traditional colors.

The world shaped by these elegant color names and colorful colors, such as Asahi, Tohun, Bottle Peep, Blunt, Akagi, Kayakusa, and Rukono -----, not only reveals the mutual care between man and nature, and the delicate perception of the change of the seasons by man, but also vividly depicts people's interest in life and their aesthetic heart throughout the ages.

We can follow these colors in the long river of history, and feel the discovery and realization of human beauty.

The illustrations in the book and "Watercolor Illustrations - Botanical Flowers" are in the same style, simple and fresh, even if you don't read the text, but just look at the illustrations are also quite interesting, experience the beauty of nature and culture.

1. Buy a set of Wuzhu or Lucky Watercolor if you can. Combined with the book's introduction to color, you can experience the qualities of the paint and the beauty of the culture at the same time.

2. Make color cards

3. Paint with a single color to fully understand the properties of color (transparency, sedimentation, diffusivity)

4. Try to copy the illustrations in the book.

This is a sugar-reducing lifestyle book that introduces the principles and benefits of sugar reduction, provides practical recipes, and thoughtfully labels the sugar content of everyday foods.

The author, Masatoshi Mizuno, is the director of the AKIBA Mizuno Clinic in Japan, and because both of his parents were diabetic and his own health was deteriorating, he initiated a study centered on sugar-reduction therapy to improve his body, helping many people with type 2 diabetes to become free of their dependence on insulin injections.

Whether it's sugar reduction, fat reduction, light fasting, and other health concepts, it seems to be a reminder that the body needs to rest, not overdo energy, reduce reliance on refined foods, and return to natural ingredients.

I love reading the recipes in these kinds of health books, and I'm not a big fan of guiding myself with healthy living, mainly because I get a rebound mentality. But incorporating these recipes into my daily life and experimenting with healthier ingredients and cooking methods does interest me. The recipes provided in this book are quite informative, the cooking methods are simple and easy to implement, and provide a lot of inspiration to help me create my own healthy meal plans.

1. Make a reduced sugar meal according to the recipe.

2, choose a healthy recipe for three meals, as a substitute for daily recipes

3, forget that you're doing health management, add recipes to your life naturally, otherwise it is easy to lose the effort (personal practice, every time I think about what I've eaten lately is full of health, and then can not help but to order a fried chicken or a small crispy meat, with a Coke)

4, create With your own recipes, it's important to introduce your favorite foods, and beneficial foods, into your daily life.

This is a dried flower floral guidebook that introduces the basic treatment of dried flowers, and offers a variety of personality-rich dried flower designs, ranging from the simply styled to the creatively inspired.

Dying isn't the end, it's the beginning of another kind of beauty

Receiving a bouquet of flowers every week, or casually buying a bouquet on the side of the road has been an integral part of my life. But always longing for new flowers also makes me agonize, yet the unique beauty I see when a flower dries up is equally appealing to me.

Dried flowers are dreamy and nostalgic.

The gentle tones that change over time bring out a completely different feel than fresh plants

Flowers always look the same, but dried flowers have their own personality. Fresh flowers bring me the vigor of life like the morning, while dried flowers bring me deep epiphanies like the night, both complementing each other to bring me a comprehensive understanding of beauty.

1. Purchase a bouquet of flowers at Flower Point Time or other flower platforms. The florist at your doorstep can also work, but I feel that some are more expensive.

2. Observe the dried flowers after they have wilted.

3. Try to arrange flowers with dried flowers to experience the beauty of dried flowers.

Natural living is to open an opening in the midst of our existing life, so that we can take a breath of fresh air in another world, and when we feel stressed, shackled, or in conflict, we can briefly escape to the world of nature, and these methods have accompanied me through a lot of difficult times.

Each of the books presented here opens a door, behind which lies a wide world, and you can choose to walk through a door and see a different landscape, and when returning to life perhaps gain a different inspiration and epiphany. Drawing elements from these worlds and adding them to real life can add to the joy of living and add a touch of aromatic seasoning to a dull and empty life.