“Now the hours of daylight are shortening noticeably. Dusk and dark advance minute by minute as these November nights close down. By midafternoon today it is beginning to resemble sundown under a heavily veiled sky,” — Edwin Way Teale from the chapter “Darker Days” in…

Tomorrow is Halloween, a favorite celebration for kids of all ages. Halloween is not just about candy and costumes. Its roots are in the festival of Samhain, a tradition of the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland. Here is an interesting description of the origins…

By all accounts October has been a spectacular year for foliage. At this writing the trees appear to be in peak color, with most of our large sugar maples sporting bright yellow and orange coats with splashes of red. The red maples are shimmering scarlet,…

Plants have long traveled the world with humans, purposefully transported and planted in regions they had never grown before. The early colonists brought plants, fruit trees, grasses and grains to the new world, just as corn (maize), squash and beans grown by the Indigenous peoples…

A lonely, male ring-neck pheasant moved onto my property in early May. I say lonely in pure human speculation, but also because he is the only pheasant we have seen and his loud penetrating kok-cack call emanating from our back pasture seems to be asking…

“On such a day as this everything is beautiful and pensive at once. There is a hint of sadness in the transient glory of these soon-departing colors. This is the culmination of the beauty of our northern year. Now in a relentless few days, in…