“Painting realistically is like a golf game. You know where you have to go, and you hit the ball in a straight line to reach your goal. Abstraction is more like a tennis game. You hit…
Magazine Series
Memories Take Shape in Wood
The route traveled on a legendary backpacking trip. Grandma and Grandpa’s woodlot. The lake where two lovebirds first met. Where our most cherished moments happen, their physical…
A Master Class in the Outdoors
Dawna Blackstone might be forgiven for feeling a little – well, intimidated – after driving nearly two hours to Orono for the first meeting of the 2024 Maine Master Naturalist…
Monitoring Forests for Climate Resilience
This past summer, University of Vermont Extension Assistant Professor Alexandra Kosiba collaborated with the NorthWoods Stewardship Center to establish climate resilience monitoring plots at a…
A Lesson in Turtles
In Massachusetts Classrooms, Students and Turtles Help Each Other The school year has just begun, and Emilie Wilder, a field biologist and associate director of conservation engagement at the…
The Woodshed Wrens
In March, I left my apartment in the city and returned to my childhood home eight states away. Mom had to sell the house in a rush, the deal closing just before the stay-at-home orders went…
Constructing a Wattle Fence
I tend to think of our woodlot as a private Home Depot, each stand its own aisle. The species and successional stage dictate both the wood’s future use and harvest schedule: a stand of…
Spring Bitter with Red-winged Blackbird
Your morning legs slip over the side of the bed easy and feel like cool green shoots, spring bitter. You taste the innocence—one that revisits you late in life after all the swimming,…
Burdock
Burdock (Arctium spp.) produces the annoying round burs that get stuck to your socks in the fall. (The fellow who invented Velcro™, George de Mestral from Switzerland, got the idea from…
Editor’s Note
People often tell us that they read each issue of Northern Woodlands cover-to-cover. I can relate. I was a cover-to-cover reader from the very first issue a friend placed in my hands, back in…