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This is a story about tiny creatures that live in the darkness of the soil. When a tree cries out in pain, some unexpected heroes come to the rescue. Nema and her gang of young nematodes (tiny worms) embark on a dangerous journey underground. The Xenos, a group of wise but deadly bacteria, hitch a ride. The story of how they help the tree is full of action, life-or-death challenges and microscopic warfare. It is a story of co-operation and ancient partnership, about events happening all over the Earth, in the hidden worlds beneath our feet.

This is a story about trees and fungi connected through a ‘wood wide web’ – told by one tiny fungal spore. A little fungus meets a baby cacao tree and they learn to feed each other. They cooperate with a forest of plants and a metropolis of microbes in the soil. But when drought strikes can they work together to survive? The fourth book in the Small Friends Books series, this science-adventure story explores the Earth-shaping partnerships between plants, fungi and bacteria.

With her home under threat from a warming ocean, Zobi, a brave rhizobia bacterium, teams up with a family of slow but steady Zoox (zooxanthellae). As the coral bleaches, everyone begins to starve... Can Zobi and the Zoox work together to save the day? This beautifully illustrated science-adventure story, set on the Great Barrier Reef, was originally published in 2015, but has been extensively re-written and revised to delight and captivate primary school-aged readers. Zobi and the Zoox: A Story of Coral Bleaching is the first in the new Small Friends Books series – Stories of Partnership and Cooperation in Nature.

Place is alive. Exploring my relationship with the land I live on pushes me to articulate a vision for place beyond the Cartesian perspective of object/subject. Instead of asking, what is this place I am in relationship with, I ask, who is this place I am in relationship with? I shift the western cultural narrative through recognising agency to the assemblage of non-humans that entangle to create life. I bring myself into a relationship with an entity rather than in space. Written expression shapes onto-epistemologies, which then shape how we interact, make laws, and care for the world. Our western institutional approach to structure and grammar are complicit in the written word being a world maker. This, coupled with an imperialism of the English language, makes for a powerful combination in shaping cultural narratives. Once the written word becomes embedded within concepts, both the conventional placement and the very definition of what is noun or verb, we begin to make meaning based on these placements and rhythms of ideas. All too often, the placement of object/subject within the sentence shapes our relationships with/to, and so often reiterates the hierarchical thinking embedded within Cartesian dualism. The process of exploring the written world as world maker encourages me to question decisions based on categorisation and orders of concepts when establishing a narrative for my work. The value of writing as part of my practice asks me to use a vigilant and ongoing re-framing of conventional language towards alternate perspectives of ecological thought. Image © Aviva Reed, 2021