A scientific investigation into the genetics of 20 fungi that infect trees has turned up an unusual explanation for why one particular fungus is killing plantation-grown poplars. According to Richard…

Apples are so common that it is easy to mistake them for commonplace. In Apples of Uncommon Character: 123 Heirlooms, Modern Classics, and Little-Known Wonders, Rowan Jacobsen entertainingly proves…

North American fields and forests harbor mycological treasures, but the good edibles constitute a tiny fraction of the myriad mushroom species. A good field guide is a reliable roadmap to the wild…

Lost in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy is an award-winning children’s picture book that is sure to delight young and old. The photographs will enthrall young children, while adults hoping to…

Bear-ly There is a Moonbeam Award-winning book by Maine children’s author and illustrator Rebekah Raye. In this book, Raye deftly blends rich, informative text on black bears with vibrant,…

For 16 years, Adelaide Tyrol has been writing this Outdoor Palette column. Since she’s an accomplished artist in her own right, we thought we’d turn the tables this time and put the…

Encountering a snake in the garden causes many people to shriek or even panic. Yet snakes and another often unloved creature, the American toad, are among the most effective forms of pest control. If…

Carbon has gotten a bum rap lately. Once called the fundamental building block of life, it’s now better known as the thing that’s going to destroy the planet. As if this weren’t…

Last autumn, at our first writers conference, we set up a table featuring 10 different brands of maple syrup from around New England, New York, and Quebec and encouraged people to pick their…

The Blister Rust Battle Resumes, A Cornucopia of Cones, New Fiction by Howard Frank Mosher, Vaccine Ravioli, Ukrainian Forests, Cashing in on Carbon, and much more

This past winter I spent three months exploring East Africa, traveling through ten different countries and covering over 8,077 miles. I was continuously impressed with how much local guides knew about…

Back when I was a boy, despite the fact that my father wasn’t a deer hunter, I’d always know when it was deer season. Even though we lived in a town where the largest industry was…

As an editor I see a lot of first-person writing cross my desk, and the majority of it is the written equivalent of a selfie. The compulsion to report on oneself goes back millions of years, and is…

What does one do with a forest? For the past few centuries, North Americans have typically answered that question in one of three ways. One answer was preservation, to leave the forest alone and enjoy…

Fenceposts have always baffled me. Why would anyone take a perfectly good tree, cut it down, dig a hole to set it in, and then spend the next 20 years watching it decay? In my early days of…

Spotted by Meghan Oliver in Thetford, Vermont. This trail of evidence points to whom?

Spend time in northern Maine, and you’ll likely get an earful of two seemingly incompatible complaints. The first is the scarcity of jobs. The shuttering of the Verso mill in Bucksport last…

Aerial landscape art includes paintings and other visual arts that depict or evoke the appearance of a landscape as it might be viewed by a bird or from an aircraft. This kind of art hardly existed…

Last fall when acorns were falling out of the oak trees by the thousands, a neighbor said we could expect a hard winter. Presumably the deer needed lots of acorns to last them through the winter.…

Imagine you had a power that allowed you to pick up nearby objects without actually touching them. Imagine this power could help you find and choose the best foods while shopping. Imagine you could…