Part travelogue, part natural history, this enchanting book explores life over the course of a year by waters that extend from Port Renfrew on the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Desolation Sound.

After moving to Vancouver Island from the Prairies in the early 2000s, Carolyn Redl made it her mission to learn as much as she could about life along the Salish Sea. She wanted to know about all the things that dig, float, swim, or merely grow in and around her new salt-water realm. With each passing day, she discovered answers to her many questions.

Four Seasons by the Salish Sea evolved over more than two decades of observation, curiosity, discovery, and delight at the natural wonders and seasonal ebbs and flows along this magnificent stretch of coastline.

This profoundly personal and deeply informative book contains facts about plants, animals, history, parks, and communities. It highlights events in nature, such as spring flower blooms and herring and salmon spawns, and reveals mysteries in the water and in the coastal cedar, hemlock, and Douglas-fir rainforest. It describes places as diverse as Malcolm Island, the Sunshine Coast, and Stamp Falls. Experiences range from viewing orcas in the distance to finding sand dollars, Turkish towels, and nudibranchs in the intertidal zone. While celebrating the area’s idyllic setting and warm climate, the book also recognizes potential threats such as earthquakes, water shortages, and challenges for gardeners.

Illustrated throughout with stunning photography, Four Seasons by the Salish Sea is a must-have book for anyone who dreams of living by the sea.

Carolyn Redl is a retired university professor, who taught literature and creative writing for over thirty years. During that time, she also wrote and published essays, short stories, poems, travel articles, and book reviews in publications such as The Edmonton Journal, AMA Insider, Prairie Journal of Canadian Fiction, and University of Toronto Quarterly. Redl is also the co-producer of “A Woman I Know: Canadian Literature by Women,” an eight-part series of programs for ACCESS, the Education Channel. She has lived on Vancouver Island on the unceded territories of the coast Salish people since 2001.

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Nancy Randall is a photographer and artist, whose work focuses on the wonders of the Salish Sea region. She has chaired the boards of art galleries in Kamloops and Nanaimo, and is the founding director of the Vancouver Island University Teaching and Learning Centre, where she was also a faculty member. Since retiring, she has taught for the University of Victoria’s Healthy Aging programs and VIU’s ElderCollege program.

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