“By the start of the twenty-first century, most humans living in the United States and Europe were spending as little time outdoors as some species of whales spend on the ocean’s surface.” This shocking observation comes from historian Jill Lepore’s forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (Liveright, Aug. 25). As humans have evolved, she writes, we’ve also devolved, losing touch with our natural roots. Lepore makes the point in quoting two researchers at Harvard, where she teaches: “In our modern world, we have sealed ourselves off from the natural world. Yet our genetic hardwiring, built over millennia, still craves that connection to nature.”

Happily, several new books offer a silver lining, celebrating the natural wonders that exist beyond our asphalt jungles.

Let’s start with trees. They’re not exactly new to the planet, but in recent years more people have come to fully appreciate them, thanks in part to such books as Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering How the Forest Is Wired for Intelligence and Healing (2021). The forest ecologist continues to awaken readers to the importance of trees in When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World (Knopf, March 31).

In his latest book, In Trees: An Exploration (Simon & Schuster, April 7), Robert Moor travels the world to offer what our critic calls an “arboreal meditation.” As Moor writes, “A tree is a way of persisting in a world of wounds.…it seems incredible that trees have managed to survive at all. And yet, certain old trees have remained standing for millennia, while empires crest and crash in their shade.”

In The Common Uncommon: A Forest Journey (Norton, April 21), biologist Bernd Heinrich writes about land in central Maine that he has known for decades. “Now in his 80s,” our critic writes, “he makes an elegant spokesperson for the value of sticking around in one place, noticing similarities and differences from year to year, or decade to decade.” Heinrich planted 15 American chestnuts in 1980; their offspring now number 1,300. Our review praises the book as “quietly fascinating rambles through a tiny territory.”

David George Haskell’s focus is on a smaller but no less wondrous subject. In How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries (Viking, March 24), the biologist draws our attention to the marvels and astounding variety of his subjects. Our reviewer writes, “Besides bringing beauty and joy into the world, flowers, Haskell asserts, can teach humans an important lesson: ‘Thriving worlds grow from cooperation, mediated by beauty, with some illusion thrown in.’”

Finally, there is Cathy Haynes, a British artist and educator, as well as author of The Fullness of Time: Marking the Day by Birdsong, Blooms, Shadows, and Stars (Riverhead, April 21), which our critic calls “an engaging book debut with a naturalist’s view of marking time.” Today, Haynes writes, “we depend heavily on complex machines and think of the hours as identical abstract units.…But what riches might we gain from exploring the forgotten art of sensing time by events in the world around us?” Many, it turns out.

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.