Visitors to the Jay C. Hormel Nature Center will soon be able to read and see the history of it all with the publication of “The Essence of Place: The Story of the Jay C. Hormel Nature Center.”

The 208-page book is set to be published in June with essays by Douglas Wood and photographs by John Duren.

“There really isn’t a place where somebody can go and read about the history of the nature center,” Duren said. “There’s bits over here, bits and pieces over here, but there’s not one place where all the history is and you can pick it up and [get] the accurate history. That’s important when you’re dealing with a place of historical significance like the nature center.”

He talked to Director/Naturalist Larry Dolphin and eventually got the funding in January 2015, but he started taking photographs in October 2014. The book is set to be published in June.

Duren teamed up with Wood, an author and musician. Wood has authored 32 books for children and adults and he is also a musician and performs in a band called “Wild Spirit.”

“I’ve visited the Nature Center many times and I’m a friend of Larry Dolphin,” Wood said. “I’ve had a long connection with it.”

He said the essays are based on his visits to the center and enjoys the creek that runs through the woods, the stone steps that cross it and the bridges.

Duran said photographing landscapes, wildlife, prairie grasses and flowers of the nature center has been his day job for the last year and a half, though it’s more like a “dawn to dusk job.”

“You can walk the same trails day after day and see and hear different things,” Duren said. “The Nature Center is a little over 500 acres and it’s not some huge million-acre park like Yellowstone. You’re not going to see bison, you’re not going to see wolves and stuff like that. But there’s always something cool to see if you just take your time hiking the trails and sitting on a bench for a short time. You’re going to see something.”

There will be five chapters in the book, each with an essay and photographs of a particular subject.

Chapter one will tell the history and beginnings of the nature center with historical black and white photos. Duren has acquired historical black and white photos from the Mower County Historical Society, newspaper articles, Gerard Academy and archives.

The middle chapters will have essays and photographs about the forest, prairie and pond. Chapter five will talk about the people who use the nature center in present times.

“We teamed up to tell the backstory of the nature center,” Duren said. “The piece of land has a really unique story. It wasn’t always the natural area with a bunch of trees and prairie and stuff like that.”

Wood said he got a lot of the material for the essays through his own visits, walking on the trails, going through large files of information, newspaper articles and in-house information from the nature center. Duren and Dolphin also gave him a lot of background information.

“I hope people will enjoy the text and what it all means,” Wood said. “Just to pick it up and look at it. It will be a gorgeous book.”

Duren and Wood are self-publishing the book, which requires “great attention to detail,” Duren said. He added the book would be appropriate for all ages.