It was not Richard Adams's novel, but Martin Rosen's excellent animated adaptation that first brought *Watership Down* to my attention. I was eight years old. It was the summer of 1979, and HBO, which had only recently broken into the mainstream, seemed to be broadcasting the film on a daily basis. Found early in life, each of us carries within us an intensely formative cultural experience, whether created by a book, a piece of music, or a film. In my case, *Watership Down* represented such an experience and was based both collectively, and individually in all three of these mediums: Rosen's film, Angela Morley's superb score, and Adams's original novel.

Facebook groups titled the likes of “traumatized by Watership Down” inevitably are referring to the PG rated 1978 film. Citing its level of peril, occasional violence, and theme of totalitarianism, some online parenting groups have placed the film on their advisory list. It's not for these reasons alone, but also the film's mysterious tone and the resulting somber mood the story and score places within the viewer, which is not easily cast out. Much the same way parents and librarians are said to have pulled Where the Wild Things Are from library shelves, both works reveal a sense of danger that exists not only in the story, but innately within the world at large. In a word, the specter of death.

For all the attention and mixed praise placed on the film, the real genius rests firmly with Adams. Reading the novel for the first time as a young adult I rediscovered the characters and story even more richly. Adams's language and details were able to percolate through me as only the slower, intermittent pace of experiencing a novel can provide. From Watership Down I deepened my love for the sanctity of nature, an appreciation for the integrity of non-human life, and above all, the sadness and sweetness of life itself that comes with an understanding of the nature of mortality – without it, beauty cannot exist.

Every few years finds me re-reading the novel to different effects. Having already absorbed the narrative and its outcomes, I was recently struck by Adams's keen and precise observations of the landscape. As a naturalist himself, Adams's writing comes close to serving as a de facto natural history of his beloved rolling landscape and the plant and animal inhabitants of Hampshire and Berkshire in the southern English countryside. It then came as no surprise that the maps in the novel represent actual, traceable locations.

If you've been inspired (or traumatized) by Watership Down in any of its incarnations, I hope you will join me on this journey. The images seen here are a work in progress. Expect to see more over time, in addition to multi-media as I attempt to make the relationship between image and text more explicit, and ultimately the publication of a book which will serve as a fine art compendium and field guide to the novel for those of us who would appreciate knowing what the primroses and bluebells of the chalk-formed downs (a hill in British English) look like. In this way, I hope the project serves as a “hedgerow vernacular,” which was the name Adams gave to the common, albeit broken language spoken across multiple species living within hedgerow habitats. An interspecies “Esperanto” of the wild, if you will, which bridged the language barrier between the likes of rabbits and mice, as we bridge the gap and explore the relationship between literature and landscape from a bioregional perspective.