Magazine Series

If, when quietly wandering around outdoors, you have ever heard and tried to track down a rhythmic, grating sound, thinking you were in search of a small rodent or perhaps a cricket, only to…

As far as trees are concerned, root damage is the root of all evil. Well, most of it, anyway. No matter what symptoms are visible – early fall color (a sign of stress), sudden death of…

Sitting in Paul and Sandal Cate’s living room in East Montpelier, Vermont, you are literally surrounded by Paul’s life-work: a forestry philosophy put into action. The outer walls…

Also called sweet birch, cherry birch, or mahogany birch, this species is perhaps the only tree around that is best recognized by the flavor of its twigs. The inner bark, as any twig-chewing…

We are easy to spot. Look for boots spattered with blue paint. Blue paint dots our wool hats in the winter and speckles our hair and baseball caps in the summer. In the fall, because the…

“There’s a place called Faraway Meadow We never shall mow in again, Or such is the talk at the farmhouse: The meadow is finished with men.” —From “The Last…

One sunny day last spring, I was prowling around the land in central New York where my ancestors had farmed. A few years earlier, my brother and my uncle had found the barn’s foundation, or…

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…

Rare is the day when all the resources that a tree needs are available in abundance. And for jack pine, a far more frugal and less aggressive species than, say, sugar maple, survival depends…

I was in the passenger seat, being driven up a driveway by a real estate agent in 1995. I looked southward through the open car window toward a wide valley encircled by beautiful mountains and…