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Category Archives: Life in the Catskills

Life, Unknown.

11-Mar-15

Kostroma Next time you are in the woods at a tiny little spring, stare into the first pool it forms and watch the leaves at the bottom of the water.  If you watch long enough – at least here in the Catskills – you will start to see relatively large (just shy of an inch long) […]

Snowbound But Melting.

10-Mar-15

Painesville We have thirty inches of snow on the ground – more at higher elevations – and moving around is still slow and difficult, but the thaw has begun.  For weeks I’ve seen almost no animal tracks anywhere but right along the bed of the creek, where the snow is less deep.  But even after a […]

The Thaw Begins.

10-Mar-15

This is the first time I’ve seen wood on my front porch after months of snow and ice.  The thaw begins.

Growing Plants From Seed.

23-Feb-15

A piece I wrote for the Catskill Native Plant Society on cold stratifying seed.

Gardening for Life.

10-Feb-15

A nice piece on Doug Tallamy and the new gardening.  “We have to raise the bar on our landscapes. In the past, we have asked one thing of our gardens: that they be pretty. Now they have to support life, sequester carbon, feed pollinators, and manage water.”  Real life always works this way: something always […]

Cherry Birch.

29-Dec-14

Speaking of “you are what you stack,” I was doing my usual winter work of splitting wood and I couldn’t help but admire this stick of cherry birch, Betula lenta.  This birch was known as “mahogany birch” for its beauty as a furniture wood, which you can see in this picture (look at the lovely […]

Table Mountain on the Solstice.

23-Dec-14

The Hunter.

18-Dec-14

I love how the snow of winter produces, like a court reporter, a continual transcript of all the events that take place on the ground.  I wouldn’t have known the property was visited continually by a bobcat two winters ago, or that there was a bear to track, were it not for the snow that […]

Ownership and Strangerhood.

06-Dec-14

I walked back home from town through the woods two days ago, taking a route I had never taken before.  As I came to my own property, clothed in the strangeness of the winter woods, it seemed so weird to me that I “owned” this place – that on some map somewhere it was known […]

The Woods of Wildcat Mountain in Early Winter.

06-Dec-14