The Nature of Texas

Wherever you live or look in Texas, nature reveals rare and striking sights. East, West, North, South, Central, Coastal?every Texas region possesses its own peculiar treasures of nature. They come in different forms: trees, mountains, mists, valleys, streams, meadows, flowers, birds, beasts, rocks, grasses, bugs, sweeping vistas of horizons, and stunning closeups of wild orchids unfolding in remote savannas. The elements have lavished upon Texas extravagant endowments of beauty.

This book is for anyone who has or aims to have a special feeling for such things. It’s a book for learners and teachers, weekenders and vacationers, shut-ins and thrown-outs, backpackers and Cadillackers, coffee tables, reception rooms, recliner pockets, fancy desks, and the front seats of family flivvers headed for the woods.

For the most part, these stories and eighty full color images have been selected from Texas Highways magazine, the ?bible” of Lone Star travelers. Crafted by some of the finest nature writers and photographers in America, both freelancers and Texas Highways staffers, these roving chapters invite readers to get up and go, to seek out and experience for themselves nature’s own memorable sights and remarkable sounds.

These stories and images are also a salute to those Texans and other people of good will who know that such sights and sounds are seriously threatened, and who help preserve them for this generation, and the next, and the next.

HOWARD PEACOCK is a native of Beaumont and a veteran freelancer whose articles appear in a score of national and regional magazines. His book The Big Thicket of Texas?America’s Ecological Wonder was honored with the coveted Editor’s Choice Award by Booklist magazine and chosen for the ?Texas Books for Every Library” listings by the State Library of Texas. He has contributed to five other books and authored a filmscript on the late Texas artist Buck Schiwetz, which won national honors. Occasionally, he conducts seminars and workshops on freelance writing at various universities. He and his wife Kitty live in a modified dogtrot farmhouse under a beech tree in Woodville, Texas, with Jade, Pine Cone, and Mr. Ian Patrick Megan, their cats?unless the latter, a gray and black furry creature weighing seventeen pounds, is actually a raccoon.