Magazine Series

I’ve known Terry Gulick long enough that my vegetable garden, which he once admired (not for its vegetables, but its volunteer crop of purslane), has gone to grass and begotten a…

The natural world holds countless examples of things intricately connected and seemingly perfectly designed. One spectacular example is the relationship between the ruby-throated hummingbird…

This map of MillionTreesNYC Afforestation study sites across New York City, includes the sites mentioned in Catherine Schmitt’s article, In the City, a Million Trees Take Root. The map…

“There is, I think, great hope for the continued presence of nature in the metropolis.” — Elizabeth Barlow, The Forests and Wetlands of New York City, 1971 Surrounded by a…

“When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink,…

It was August in northern New York, and the leaves still shone an optimistic green. But Labor Day was closing in, and my wife Lisa and I would soon join millions of other parents as empty…

One of the most common questions that foresters get is, “How old is this tree?” Often, the response is less than satisfactory, as the forester carries on about site…

White-tailed deer are so abundant in the eastern United States that it may be hard to believe the species was absent in many areas, including most of the Northeast, just a century ago.…

While walking in a milkweed patch at dusk, Tig Tillinghast found a flower crab spider that had just ambushed and immobilized a fly. “It was difficult to get adequate depth for this…

Mere hours old, a comical procession of 12 downy puffs drop one by one from their nest cavity 30 feet high in a white ash snag. Scrambling to keep up with their mother, a female wood duck,…