Tortuous Taxonomy, Sensuous World
As someone who just assumed that scientific names were authoritative and fixed and trustworthy, and — therefore — not very interesting, I am surely one of the readers Carol Kaesuk Yoon was addressing in...
Dandelions
Here’s a passage from the book I’m reading just now. The perfectly formed, little golden flowers soon give way to an equally beautiful, delicate white seed head that when blown upon by wind or...
Family Tree
The expression “family tree,” along with its heritage of wonderful drawings, with names (such as the one used here as an illustration, see below for details.) testifies to at least one fundamental understanding of...
The Englishness of Gardening
Andrea Wulf is the author of that splendid account of a particularly English obsession with gardening, The Brother Gardeners. She is not English. That matters. In fact, it goes a long way toward accounting for the...
A Cooler Look at Colour
People who don’t know each other very well hardly ever talk about colour. It has an odd reputation for being personal. People say they “like” one colour or another, but after that there’s rarely any...
Pruning an Overgrown Mind
When you reach a certain age, you’re no longer the protagonist of your own actions: all you have left are the consequences of things you’ve already done. The seeds you’ve sown have been growing...
