In the heart of Vermont’s Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner are presented with the opportunity to steward a two hundred-acre conserved farm. Whybrow knows that “belonging more than anything requires participation” and radically intertwines her life with the land. Six months after purchasing Knoll Farm, they unload a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the field and Whybrow becomes a shepherd entering into “nature’s constant cycle of life into death into life” and all its unexpected lessons.

The challenging and profoundly rewarding work unfolds for Whybrow in the everyday rituals of farmsteading and caring for her family—birthing lambs in the late winter, harvesting blueberries in summer, fending off coyotes and foxes, seasonal shearing—while instilling the lessons of the land in her daughter and caring for her mother. As life at Knoll Farm endures years both abundant and lean, she learns that true stewardship is about accepting change and adapting. She embraces a transcendent rhythm of blood and bone, milk and muck. At once inspiring and brave, deeply felt and gorgeously written, The Salt Stones is a loving look at the world through a shepherd’s interconnected ethos.

Helen Whybrow is the author of A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite’s Radical Experiment in Living and Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from 1800–1900. She is also the editor of many anthologies. She has been a visiting faculty member at Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where she shepherds a two-hundred acre organic farm.

Tom Wessels is a terrestrial ecologist and professor emeritus at Antioch University New England, where he founded the master's degree program in Conservation Biology. His books include: Reading the Forested Landscape, The Granite Landscape, Untamed Vermont, The Myth of Progress, Forest Forensics, and Granite, Fire, and Fog: The Natural and Cultural History of Acadia. Tom has conducted workshops on ecology and sustainability throughout the United States for more than three decades.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase from Blue Hill Books. For more information, please call the library at 374-5515 or email Assistant Director Kayleigh Thomas at kayleigh.thomas@bhpl.net.