Magazine Series

My friend John the blacksmith lent me an old book, A Natural History of Trees, by Donald Culross Peattie, which is both quaint and authoritative. Maybe it’s this combination of…

The feeding habits of porcupines are far more diverse than many people realize. Cambium, phloem, foliage, buds, flowers, fruits, and nuts comprise the mainstay of Erethizon dorsatum’s…

In winter at Halibut Point, a rocky headland on the Massachusetts coast, the drama begins at dawn. A stout gust rips the white from whitecaps and sprays the shore with ice that tinkles like…

Management Stories From North America's Northern, Northern Woodlands When I say “northern Quebec” to most people, I either get blank looks or they say something vague about how…

Walking through our old Christmas tree plantation, the fragrance of balsam fir evokes memories of dragging freshly cut trees to the baler, riding on the top of a wagon full of trees, and…

Of the billions of trees in the Northeast, I’ve known maybe 50 well, maybe 10 with a draw-from-memory intimacy. The apple trees I prune each year in the yard, for instance, or the sugar…

A few years back, we had some family friends over for a cookout. One of them looked up at the long, straight rows of Christmas trees growing on our hillside in the distance. “It looks…

I heard about Joe Wheelwright before I knew him – that’s the natural order of things in a small town. “There’s this guy out in East Corinth who turns trees into…

Those of us who live in the Northeast are familiar with the vicissitudes of winter. We know firsthand that not every day sparkles with rime ice or delivers fluffy drifts of sun-dappled snow.…

Photographer Roger Irwin took this photo of his friend Phil Stearns on a small beaver pond in Groveton, New Hampshire, on a brittle, early-winter day.