Yellow-fuzz cone slime (Hemitrichia clavata) is a slime mold that is found in clusters on rotting wood. Neither plant nor animal, slime molds are known for the dramatic transformations they go through…

In the southeastern corner of Vermont is a 465-acre forest owned by the town of Vernon. It’s named the J. Maynard Miller Municipal Forest, after the local dairy farmer who convinced his town to…

The grapevine was so important to the ancient Romans that they called it vitis, after the Latin word for life. Today, botanists still give the name Vitis to the genus of grapevines. While the wild…

Have you, too, been annoyed by books that should have been abbreviated and published as pamphlets – how to change a tire, organize your garage, or how to make kimchi? I was ever so slightly on…

Owning just a single choker chain is a lot like having one Crescent wrench in your toolbox. Sure, you can get the job done, but it would be a lot more efficient (and enjoyable) if you had a set of…

The long, instinctive migration of monarch butterflies from the northern United States and Canada to their wintering grounds in central Mexico is considered one of the natural world’s most…

As the composition of tree species in forests in southern New England has evolved in recent decades, many of those forests have become more vulnerable to drought. The reason for the changing forest…

In the world of trees, it is difficult for seeds and seedlings to take root far from their parent plants, yet that’s a key factor in seedling survival. “The closer you are to mom, the more…

Somewhere out there is a ship carrying, in one of its thousands of steel containers, a natural disaster. The ship could be an old rust bucket. Or a brand new, high-tech cargo vessel. It might be…

You’d think, in our high-tech world, there’d be some sort of sensor or detector or app that could electronically evaluate and instantly confirm that a log is truly veneer-worthy. But the…

In Peru, a botica is a pharmacy – the sterile, white kind, with glass countertops, bright lights, and shelves lined with tidy boxes. But I’ve come all the way to Pucallpa – a noisy,…

“Leaves of three, let them be” is the old saying to help keep you from touching poison ivy, but not all plants that have leaves or leaflets arranged in groups of threes have the potential to cause…

Joe Wheelwright, the sculptor, died on September 28. I met Joe while writing this story about him in 2012. When I heard the news of his passing I went back and read it again; looked at the pictures…

On the north end of my home is a nest site favored by eastern phoebes. Every year a pair shows up, sets up house, and raises a family. They arrive early in the spring, and I spend the long days of…

Scenes from the West’s five-year drought are striking – the cracked mud at the bottom of a dry reservoir, forests in flames. Wonder what a drought would look like in Vermont and New…

A bit of fall color on the forest floor. What are we looking at here? (Thanks to Tammis Coffin for the photo.)

I love gnarly trees, and one of the gnarliest I’ve seen is located on the back corner of my central Vermont property. It’s a monstrous maple, sitting on a wide, burly base with knobs here…

We’d torn a burner out of an old hot water heater and suspended it with wire beneath a hastily welded angle iron table; it formed a sort of makeshift stove. Then we set the whole thing outside.…

"The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow.” So says the psalmist, a deep fellow, not…

We like to think that everything in nature has its own particular time and place. But nature is fond of throwing us curves. As a naturalist, a common question I’m asked during foliage season is,…