What do you believe? Individually, most of us know pretty much where we stand on life’s bigger issues—and similarly on life’s smaller, though even on these we may not agree, which is what leads to family ructions over things like toothpaste squeezing and cats on the bed.  READ MORE

Scientists—who have a tendency to stomp the poetry out of any experience—now know what makes the garden smell so luscious after a rain.  READ MORE

Plants have feelings, just like people. So what happens when you feed one plant with compliments and another with negative remarks?” asked the Swedish company IKEA.  READ MORE

If you happen to be a celebration-prone type of person, as an American you’re in luck: The United States is awash in unexpected holidays. In fact, there’s at least one for every day of the year.  READ MORE

A recent study, published in 2015 in the journal Nature, calculated that there are three trillion trees on planet Earth. That’s 3,000,000,000,000 trees—a number that’s impossible to wrap one’s mind around unless you’re an astrophysicist or a politician accustomed to dealing with the national deficit.   READ MORE

Vermont is not a state noted for sun. In fact, sunshine-wise, we’re nearly the gloomiest state in the nation, second only to dank and lightless Washington, where apparently nobody in Seattle ever leaves home without an umbrella.  READ MORE

Much though I love the book, as a scientist I’ve always been suspicious of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. For those gardeners who haven’t read it, this is the story of ten-year-old Mary Lennox, possibly the world’s most disagreeable orphan.   READ MORE

Here where we live, on the Vermont side of northern Lake Champlain, we get a lot of wind. In the Summer, it whips the lake into whitecaps, rips the laundry off the line, and knocks the lawn furniture over.  READ MORE

There’s no getting around the fact that these days we’re a divided nation. This year, everybody’s Thanksgiving feast and Christmas dinner almost certainly took a hit from who—politically—supports who and why and who, just as passionately, doesn’t and why not.  READ MORE

According to Kermit the Frog, it’s not easy being green. His sad point was that—being green—you blend, wallflower-like, into the background and everybody passes you by. Green means ignored, neglected, and invisible.  READ MORE

In summer the sun sets due west of us over Lake Champlain and spends most of the afternoon shining in our kitchen windows—and, incidentally, spends the lion’s share of the day scattering rays on the garden. In Winter it sets way to the south down past the Alburgh bridge and barely shines on us at all.  READ MORE

Name a famous squirrel. Go on, try. And just for an extra challenge, make it a real-life squirrel.  READ MORE

How much snow? If there’s any measure most prone to exaggeration, inaccuracy, and anecdote, it may be depth of snow—possibly only topped by size of fish, which as anyone who is (or knows) a fisherman is aware, can reach gigantic proportions, especially if said fish got away before being hauled into a boat within reach of a tape measure.  READ MORE

What is it with seeds? Why are lettuce and carrot seeds so ridiculously teeny that the instructions on the package (“plant three to four inches apart in rows”) make no sense unless you’ve got fingers like a leprechaun?  READ MORE

In our family, it’s always been the custom on the first day of every month—before speaking a single word, not even “Good morning” or “Coffee, please”—to lean out the window and yell, “Rabbit Rabbit!”  READ MORE

The narrator of Wishtree, a new book by Katherine Applegate, is a tree. The tree’s name is Red—it’s a northern red oak, Quercus rubra—and it’s been a neighborhood tree and home to a thriving community of animals for a long, long time.  READ MORE

We have a lot of books. I’ve never actually counted them, but all told, they might just possibly add up to several million, since all the walls in my office are full of them, and most of our furniture seems to consist of bookcases.  READ MORE

The next potential big crop for Vermont, says the front page of our local newspaper, is saffron. The saffron story shared the headlines with the school lunch program, the Little League scores, and a debate over a new fire engine purchase, which shows the sort of comforting, low-level news we get up here just south of the Canadian border.  READ MORE

For a lot of us, chances are it’s beets. Just 11% of home gardeners bother to grow beets, and professional farmers don’t do much better.   READ MORE

If there’s anything more American than apple pie, it’s probably the Sears Roebuck catalog. The Sears catalog—or at least its primal predecessor—first appeared in 1888, when Richard Sears (ex-railroad employee) started a mail-order business, selling watches.  READ MORE

As of July 2016, Vermont has an Official State Vegetable. It’s the Gilfeather turnip, a solid and stodgy veggie that—given a little encouragement—can grow to the size of a groundhog.   READ MORE

You might not think that this is all about gardens. But it is. Just wait. The royal “we”—the pronoun that sounded so poncy when Queen Victoria glared frostily down her nose and announced, “We are not amused”—turns out to apply to each and every one of us.   READ MORE

April showers bring May flowers” is a proverb that dates at least to 1560. That is, more or less. The 16th-century version was “Aprell sylver showers so sweet/Can make May flowers to sprynge.”  READ MORE

In Andy Weir’s The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney, victim of a freak accident, has been left for dead on Mars. Now 140 million miles from home, stranded and incommunicado, but very much alive, he has to figure out how to survive on his own for four years.  READ MORE

Apples have a bad reputation dating back to the Book of Genesis. And we’re never going to let them forget about it, either, since we’ve immortalized their part in the Garden-of-Eden fiasco in scientific Latin.   READ MORE

I love Downton Abbey. I’m willing to put up with all its foibles—the lackluster Lady Edith; the snippy Lady Mary; the continual arrests of one or the other of the Bateses; Thomas, the conniving footman—just so I can get a glimpse of aristocratic British country life in the early 20th century.  READ MORE

Think about this much and it’s a downright creepy question. I mean, consider what we do to plants. We prune them, mow them, cage them, tie them to poles and fences, pick parts of them and eat them, and uproot them and toss them on the compost pile.  READ MORE

What did you plant in your garden the year before last? Or the year before that? (And no peeking if you’re the sort of well-organized gardener who keeps notes.) Human memory—packaged between our ears in an organ not much bigger than a grapefruit—is enormous. Scientists calculate that the average human brain can store somewhere around 2.5 quadrillion bytes of information—that is, over 100 times the amount of info contained in the entire Library of Congress.  READ MORE

A lot of things simply don’t grow in Vermont. Magnolias, figs, azaleas, and avocados don’t have what is popularly known here as a snowball’s chance in hell. We’re devoid of coconut palms, papayas, and bananas, and the only oranges we can cultivate all by ourselves grow on those tiny little trees that grow indoors in pots—provided, that is, that the furnace doesn’t go off in January.  READ MORE

Linguistic purists—of which practically every language has at least a few—are people who want to restore language to its original roots, with no messy input from foreign tongues or made-up modern babble like bling, geek, and google.  READ MORE