"Parables from Nature" by Margaret Scott Gatty utilizes the Charlotte Mason method of instruction, which is preferred by many homeschooling families. "Parables from Nature" weaves interesting facts from nature and science into the stories. The collection includes all 29 stories from the first, second, third, and fourth series, originally published in separate volumes.The stories in "Parables from Nature" are challenging, rich and complex, as they seek to uncover God's craftsmanship in the natural world, how the seen teaches us about the unseen. This is a great book to glean ideas from and stretch the intellect, imagination and understanding. This is newly laid out with clear print and a readable font (not like the hard-to-read facsimile editions provided by some other publishers).

Margaret Roach has been harvesting thirty years of backyard parables-deceptively simple, instructive stories from a life spent digging ever deeper-and has distilled them in this memoir along with her best tips for garden making, discouraging all manner of animal and insect opponents, at-home pickling, and more. After ruminating on the bigger picture in her memoir And I Shall Have Some Peace There, Margaret Roach has returned to the garden, insisting as ever that we must garden with both our head and heart, or as she expresses it, with "horticultural how-to and woo-woo." In The Backyard Parables, Roach uses her fundamental understanding of the natural world, philosophy, and life to explore the ways that gardening saved and instructed her, and meditates on the science and spirituality of nature, reminding her readers and herself to keep on digging.