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…

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…

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…

“Excuse me. Is this . . . the peak?” This query, from a perplexed tourist whose family had traveled from Italy to enjoy New England’s world-renowned foliage last fall,…

Renewable Energy with the Convenience of Fossil Fuel It’s a scene you’ve undoubtedly witnessed many times: a fuel truck lumbers up to a house, the driver attaches a hose to the…

Have you ever air-dried a stack of pine boards and wondered why some bowed and some didn’t? Or noted that perfectly constructed joints swelled to a not-so-perfect fit in the summer? Or…

I first heard about hairy-chested yeti crabs while driving home one night, listening to NPR. Robert Siegel was interviewing Alex Rogers, an Oxford biologist. Rogers led a research team that…

These days, the talk around Berlin, New Hampshire, revolves around what comes next. Politicians and venture capitalists and community groups are hard at work trying to come up with a second…

When friends and colleagues hear that we’ve written a book on the ants of New England, their first reaction is always to ask: “I have ants in my ... (kitchen, walls, pants). How…