The Evergreen Farm includes 27 tales and essays composed by the author over three decades for the outdoors magazines. All have been inspired by exciting and memorable experiences enjoyed by the writer in the Pennsylvania forests,farmlands, and mountain streams.
Because the pieces are arranged chronologically according to the time of the narrated event, they account, when taken together, for a boy's growing up in rural Pennsylvania from the Depression years through World War II. Most feature some engagaging wildlife personality. Here in story form are the ruffed grouse, the mountain brook trout, the wild huckleberry, the spring peeper, the timber rattlesnake, the sugar maple, the black bear, the pennyroyal mint, and many more.
The book is beautifully illustrated by the watercolor drawings of Francis Golden, by pen-and-ink sketches, and by photographs, both color and black-and-white, by such eminent wildlife photographers as John Netherton and Clara Sipprell.
Bill Betts is the author of Lincoln and the Poets (Univ. of Pgh. Press, 1965), A Docketful of Wry, Slips That Pass in the Night, and scores of essays and tales for the nature magazines, as well as scholarly essays on literature for the learned journals.
Now retired from 40 years of university teaching, he continues to write on the outdoors and to do free-lance editing.