“Excuse me. Is this . . . the peak?” This query, from a perplexed tourist whose family had traveled from Italy to enjoy New England’s world-renowned foliage last fall, rather…

A quiz: The first society to make paper was: A. Egypt. B. China. C. Vespidae. Answer: C. Vespidae is the family that includes paper making wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets. Social insects,…

Anyone in Maine who was paying attention knew that by the end of September 1947, a forest fire was likely. There had been almost no rain during the previous 10 weeks of high summer. Newspapers and…

Renewable Energy with the Convenience of Fossil Fuel It’s a scene you’ve undoubtedly witnessed many times: a fuel truck lumbers up to a house, the driver attaches a hose to the…

Where I live, the three warmer seasons are colored gold. In mid-May, the fields are covered with dandelions. Then come the buttercups, which turn the landscape into a real-life Monet painting. Now,…

Some might call it a plantation, and some a tree farm, but my family refers to it simply as “the farm.” To the outside observer, our marginal patch of land may appear aesthetically…

Don’t fear this spiky crawler; it’s not so scary. What is it?

Editor’s Note: We recently hired Elise Tillinghast to be our new Executive Director. Those of you who live in the Upper Valley may know her from her work in area non-profits; regular readers of…

At the Mohonk Mountain Preserve in New York’s Shawangunk Mountains, naturalists have been collecting data on weather, spring migrants, plant life, and seasonal milestones for almost 90 years.…

In his New York Times best-seller A Walk in the Woods, author Bill Bryson mourns the loss of the “massively graceful” American chestnut: “There has never been any tree like it.…

There is nothing wild about most wild rice. Most was grown in a “paddy” in California, harvested by machines, processed in factories, and finally wrapped in packages of cardboard and…

Most people, when they look at a tree, look up. Understandable. The trunk lofts limbs skyward, unfurling a shimmering sunlight-gulping net of leaves. But with a little imagination (and, more…

It’s human nature to categorize, to organize, to put things in boxes. Take seasons. Conventional wisdom holds that Labor Day weekend is the last weekend of summer, and thus we are now firmly…

Can your eyes ID these pods?

Fresh tracks frozen in the November snowpack reveal where, earlier this morning, a doe and two fawns browsed on raspberry canes, red maple stump suckers, and selected mushrooms. Following their…

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy. The opposite of a republican is not a democrat, it’s an anarchist. The opposite of a beef farmer is not a vegan, but rather someone who…

It was a late-May afternoon in central Oklahoma and big time thunderstorms were expected to form soon. I was there as part of a 30-person tornado research team – a Vermont weatherman’s…

The Center for Northern Woodlands Education is pleased to announce that Elise Tillinghast of Thetford Center, Vermont, has been selected as our new executive director. She will begin her duties on…

Along the apple’s aged bole, fall rains had tamped the burst of feathers between flattened riparian grass, but the white dots on black were unmistakable. “Downy,” my pop said,…

If you’ve been to camp or a business seminar recently, you may have played an icebreaker called “Two Truths and a Lie.” The rules are simple: tell two truths and one lie about…