I love the Christmas tree, its unmistakable smell, the kindled magic it brings to the dark days of winter. And yet, this year, I faced a moral quandary: having just written about trees as persons, could I justify bringing a cut tree into my home? To answer this question, I decided to research the history…
Read MoreLately, I’ve been captivated by this idea of living corridors – paths for wildlife as they spread out from generation to generation – that forms Sara Stein’s departing vision in her wonderful book Noah’s Garden. Her point is this: if we want to invite wildlife back into our neighborhoods, we cannot go at it alone….
Read MoreIn an earlier post, I wrote about a kind of literacy we seem to have lost: the ability to “read” our landscape, to recognize and name the plants that make up our natural world. Thinking about this analogy between nature and writing, I started to wonder if one kind of literacy supplants another. In other…
Read MoreHave you ever been in a country where you’re learning the language and you find yourself constantly interrogating signs, commercials, etc., picking out the words you know and trying to decipher the others? That’s how I’ve felt ever since I started to learn to recognize the flora of the place where I now live, in…
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