Magazine Series

A huge mound of vines, 8 feet wide by a dozen yards long, lay baking in the August sun. The effort required to cut all those vines by hand, drag them out of the woods, and pile them up to dry…

Although apple scab is everywhere all the time, it is most apparent in the fall, as we try to avoid apples spotted with its telltale, ugly, black lesions. Those spots, it turns out, were…

I bought my first draft horse in 1986, and I have been working horses, and oxen, in the woods ever since. One of the most common questions I get is, “Can you really make any money…

Since only a very few trees grow absolutely vertically, determining and adjusting for the lean of a tree is an important skill for any sawyer preparing to fell a tree. For the sake of…

In the fullness of summer and in the depths of winter, chokecherry is not particularly noticeable. By early June, it has all but disappeared as part of the anonymous expanse of greenness that…

Let me start with a story. Several years ago, a logger showed me the harvesting he was doing on a piece of his family’s property. This was the third time he had harvested this particular…

It’s cheap, it’s plastic, but for half a century, the little 21-drawer storage chest has been serving its purpose. It and everything in it could very well have been tossed long…

Thomas Deininger is an artist, an environmentalist, and an iconoclast. His large assemblages often fracture traditional artistic premises in an overt and seductive manner. By using decidedly…

The prices reported here are those that log buyers—mostly sawmills and wholesalers—are paying for logs. Because these are prices paid for delivered wood, landowners need to adjust…

Trees grow where they can. And they are surpassingly capable, making do in an impressive array of conditions around the globe, including many harsh places. But there are limits to their…