I’m becoming one of those people. My last four Facebook posts were pictures of my dog and it’s only because I vaguely remember being put off when people posted endless pictures of their dog (why was that? I don’t seem to be able to remember) that I haven’t posted more. It’s been three weeks since…
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A friend of mine recently asked me to come over and give her some advice about her garden. As we chatted about this and that, she started absentmindedly weeding and was about to pluck out a few seedlings, when I cautioned her: white wood aster! You want to let that grow! I was quite pleased…
Read MoreI asked Carolyn Summers, a landscape designer and native plant expert, what she thought could be done to address what many botanical gardens are calling “plant blindness” and which I likened to a form of illiteracy. This ignorance about plants is relatively new, she pointed out. Take a look at an old Boy Scout manual,…
Read MoreThe book that has been waiting for me in the wings – ecologists and philosophers could have told me – is David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than Human World. It’s been a classic of the environmental movement for over twenty years but is new to me. Abrams speaks…
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