The first winter we lived in our house, we cleared about a dozen holly trees lining the road front of our house. Neighbors were pleased: the previous occupants of our house hadn’t paid these trees any mind, so the neighbors had taken to pruning them themselves to prevent the spiny…

I am trying to kill the fig buttercup the way I’m supposed to according to the government website, but right now there’s a bee on it. — Ada Limón I can suffer the blackberries their existence in September, when they provide me with pie. My work to remove them all…

I sat and watched a pileated woodpecker build a nest for twenty minutes recently. Minutes I meant to be spending doing other things. These largest of Pacific Northwest woodpeckers can be heard from quite a distance — pecking, I suppose, though that word seems too small for the sound they…

When Sleeping Beauty, also known as Little Briar-Rose fell into an enchanted sleep on her fifteenth birthday, having pricked her finger on the foreordained spindle, a “thorn hedge” grew around the castle to protect her from the princes who heard of her beauty and, nevermind that she was unconscious, tried…

We had an arborist out to our house recently, because a hemlock tree nearly 80 feet tall and not a dozen feet from our house was clearly in the process of dying. …

“Bringing back the bush involves two quite different kinds of time. The first is time spent working…the second is the time spent waiting…This time costs patience, but no money at all.” — Joan Bradley I’ve never felt like I had a good answer to the common icebreaker question asking who…

Read part I here Reading about scotch broom as I drove away from my wedding was the first time I explicitly remember being able to identify an invasive plant, though I don’t remember wondering what the term meant, so I must have heard it somewhere before. Himalayan blackberry was the…

The biosphere does not belong to us; we belong to it. — Edward O. Wilson The summer my husband and I married, we drove to Seattle from Denver, where we were living at the time. We drove through Wyoming and Montana on the way there — you can almost forget…

We all might do well to remember that names are one measure of how one chooses to inhabit the world. — Lauret E. Savoy Three years ago, I didn’t know any of the plants that live around me. The plants, more accurately, that I live among. I didn’t know them…