This week’s gift from a neighbor’s chicken coop included one extra-large egg. After hard-boiling and cracking open we found a double yolk, which some say is a good omen on our wedding anniversary. The following conversation over a meal would
Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell loved to travel from West Sussex to the fauna of wilder places in the world. No longer. They have re-envisioned their ‘backyard’ as semi-wilderness. Some backyard! They own the Knepp estate of 3,500
The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald knew that Americans find public expression of their successful lives in a neatly groomed lawn. Jay Gatsby was so horrified at Nick Carroway’s ragged lawn next door that he sent his gardeners over to mow
Outside a country store in the Allegheny Mountains, she stood behind a table covered in mason jars of home-made apple jelly and pickles. It was one of those glorious fall days in West Virginia, so I lingered to buy some
The American composer of “There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover” either had the excuse of poetic license or didn’t know that bluebirds are absent from the British Isles. But the song became one of one of Dame
I aimed for a weekly post about the health of the natural world, but here I am dwelling on coronavirus again. Is anyone undistracted by this pandemic? This time I dusted off my copies of Samuel Pepys diaries in which
There was a time when the womb was regarded as a pristine environment for a ‘fetonaut’ to travel safely for 9 months until birth, protected by a shield-like placenta. No longer. The effects of smoking, thalidomide and binge drinking show
That day slept in deep memory until Dharavi appeared in news reports about the threat of COVID-19. It wasn’t a Westerner’s curiosity about the plight of poor people that brought me in 2003 after an engagement in Mumbai; it was
According to legend, Robin Hood and his Merry Men hid from their pursuers in a hollow tree in Sherwood Forest during the harsh reign of King John (1199-1219). The tree still stands, albeit courtesy of props and wires, and called
We gathered along an empty country road to gaze at the wounded hillside. It now has an orange stripe of bare earth instead of a green canopy. The sight reminded me of how skin contracts from the path of a
A shameless boast, I take fewer than a dozen plastic shopping bags home from the grocery store each year (a trillion are manufactured). Discarded in garbage for burial in landfill, this non-compostable stuff awaits a post-Homo sapiens archeologist who learns
A woman in a desolate corner of North Macedonia claimed to be the last wild beekeeper in Europe made a splash at the Oscars. Her story told in Honeyland took three years to produce on a slim budget and was