During summer trips to visit family, from home in Vermont to Connecticut, and then from home to Maine and back, I’ve been checking out a lot of roadside plants. That is to say, a lot of chicory,…

Butternut country is so distinctive that Parker Nichols knows he has arrived even before he sees the first butternut tree. As the proprietor of Vermont WildWoods, a flooring and millwork company in…

Last Saturday, I went down to Woodstock for the 10th anniversary celebration of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park. The event was also the unveiling of their new Forest Center, a…

The apple blossoms this past spring were the first hint of an unusual season – they were abundant and lovely. The crab nearest our house set fruit for the first time in a decade. Then I noticed…

We rented a hydraulic splitter last week for processing firewood. It was the first time I’d ever used one. The task at hand was a nearly two-century-old, field-grown sugar maple that had toppled…

The yellow warbler is a tiny explosion of color, music and tenacity. Every spring these songbirds arrive from the tropics to our alder swamps, willow stands and wet thickets. The male glows neon…

    An earwig still evokes a shudder after many centuries, for the insect’s Old English name, earwicga (”ear” and “worm”), suggests it might crawl into your ear…

In the 1958 film, “The Blob,” a huge amoeba-like creature from outer space engulfs and kills several people in a small Pennsylvania town before it is eventually destroyed by a local…

If the man in the film who explained, “Honey, I shrunk the kids,” turned his attention to you, and you ended up one centimeter tall and found yourself on the lawn, you would have your work…

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Several decades ago, after long hours of work in the carrels of Dartmouth’s Baker Library, I would make time for a walk around the library’s illuminated clock tower to view the aerial…

Hi! My name’s Dave Mance III. I’m the new Managing Editor at Northern Woodlands magazine, which is to say that I’m the new Anne Margolis (except not quite as organized and, well, a…

Helpers are already at work in your garden and woods, though it’s unlikely you’ve noticed them. They are wasps, and they are busy killing insect pests. Most readers will remember their…

A lot of you know Ken Gagnon – he’s a real nice guy. He’s got a family-owned mill in Pittsford, Vermont. When I called him recently about renewing his usual ad in the magazine for…

Ryan Smith, a wildlife technician with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, stood with his back to the mouth of the Mount Aeolus bat cave in Dorset, Vermont, in early April. Behind him, icicles…

In both New Hampshire and Vermont, landowners and state officials are discussing the benefits of removing old dams and restoring rivers to their historical banks. Many of these dams are small, though…

My thoughts turn to gardens, the earthy fragrance of moist woodland – and to slugs tucked under a rock. Few things disturb gardeners so much as slugs and the silvery ribbons of slime they leave…

How much can a bird’s egg tell us about the bird that laid it and how it lives? As it turns out, it can tell us a lot about the generalities, but little about the details. For example, what does…

In years past, I’ve come across nice patches of morels in our woods at the end of May and into June. They seem to respond to a good dose of rain, and a few days after a storm they’ll be…

Old fields pulse with activity. Butterflies flutter, crickets call, meadow voles scurry, and black-and-yellow garden spiders ambush from dew-spangled webs. Early June footsteps release the floral…