If you love waterfalls, here are some of the best hikes in the Southern Appalachians. And if you love plants--or simply would like to learn more about them--you will be in hiking heaven: naturalist Tim Spira's guidebook links waterfalls and wildflowers in a spectacularly beautiful region famous for both. Leading you to gorgeous waterfalls in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia, the book includes many hikes in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

In Search of Mycotopia, Doug Bierend introduces readers to an incredible and oft-overlooked kingdom of life and the potential it holds for our future, by way of the weird and wonderful communities of citizen scientists and microbe devotees working on the fungal frontier. Together they form a picture of the modern mycological movement, which sees these organisms as teachers, partners, and sources of wisdom that offer ways and means for creating a better world.

Each year, South Carolina's forty-seven state parks draw nearly eight million visitors who come to enjoy the unadulterated beauty of the land and its wildlife. Beautiful Places, released by the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation & Tourism, is a vibrant photographic history of these sanctuaries. The product of decades of arduous work on the part of legislators, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and committed citizens, the parks preserve the diverse natural features of South Carolina--from its mountains to its forest canopies to its gentle, sprawling beaches.

Foraging edible plants was once limited to specialists, survivalists, and herbalists, but it's become increasingly mainstream. Influenced by the popularity of the locavore movement, many restaurants feature foraged plants on their menus, and a wide variety of local foraged plants are sold at farmers markets across the country. With Edible wild plants of the Carolinas, Lytton John Musselman and Peter W. Schafran offer a full-color guide for the everyday forager, designed to help anyone enjoy the many wild plants found in the biodiverse Carolinas.

Outdoor Adventures in the Upcountry, edited by Michel Stone, is a collection of true stories about hunting, fishing, paddling, birding, and other recreational pursuits by the area's best nature and outdoor writers. This colorful large-format book is beautifully illustrated with dozens of images by nature photographer Ted Borg, whose work has appeared for decades in South Carolina Wildlife magazine.

Mushrooms in the wild present an enticing challenge: some are delicious, others deadly, still others take on almost unbelievable forms. This field guide introduces 650 mushrooms found in the Carolinas, more than 50 of them appearing in a field guide for the first time, using clear language and color photographs to reveal their unique features.