Book analyzes essays on nature writing

William Summer founded the renowned Pomaria Nursery, which thrived from the 1840s to the 1870s in central South Carolina and became the center of a bustling town that today bears its name. The nursery grew into one of the most important American nurseries of the antebellum period, offering varieties of fruit trees and ornamentals to gardeners throughout the South.

Summer also published catalogs containing well selected and thoroughly tested varieties of plants and assisted his brother, Adam, in publishing several agricultural journals throughout the 1850s and up until 1862.

In Taking Root, James Everett Kibler Jr., who retired in 2009 as a professor of English at UGA, collects for the first time the nature writing of William and Adam Summer, two of America’s earliest environmental authors.

Written over a span of two decades, their essays offer an impressive environmental ethic. A sampling of their more than 600 articles appears in this volume.