Grazing the Forest
My famiy and I are spending the weekend at the house of my Aunt and Uncle and two cousins, and yesterday afternoon we took a walk through the large wooded property that they own. As always, I was...
View ArticleA Catalogue of Flowers
Walking the beaches of Manitoulin Island, as I did today for the first time since last summer, is my surest therapy. It is always a journey through the flora of my unconscious, the unnamed and...
View ArticleEcology and Economy
I took my two boys to The Green Legacy Tree Nursery yesterday morning. I ran across this operation when I was looking for seed-grown Red Mulberry trees a month or so ago, and I thought that the boys...
View ArticleWild Carrots
I have some fairly large sections of Wild Carrots in the areas of my yard that are still pretending to be a lawn. Wild Carrot is sometimes also called Queen Anne’s Lace or Bird’s Nest or Bee’s Nest or...
View ArticleMudpuppy
My eldest son set me a task as we were driving up to Parry Sound this past Saturday: “Dad, let’s find a salamander.” This task, I knew, would be harder than he realized. Though my brothers and I...
View ArticleThe Dogwoods
The dogwoods stand among the still winter-gold grasses, red on gold, defiantly, though everything will soon succumb to green, to fecundity, to the leaves just now budding on the dogwood stems, to the...
View ArticleThe Verticality of the Forest
I am always confronted by the verticality of the forest, by the way it ascends, layer on layer, from the underbrush to the canopy, and my walking through the forest, even when I am walking along its...
View ArticleMuskrat
I have never seen a muskrat before, and I was not expecting to see one when I wandered down for a walk by the river the other day. I thought I might see the mallard ducks that can usually be found...
View ArticleAt Home in Our Environment
We have had a few hot days lately, and so the complaining has begun, as it always does, usually by the same people who complain about cold in winter and rain in spring and raking in autumn, which is to...
View ArticleNature Deficit
I was on CFRU’s Family Matters show with Wendy McDonnell again this past Sunday to talk about the subject of nature deficit. The other guests were John Jantunen and Anne Gajerski-Cauley. If you are...
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