Essays

All essays

Recent writing on gardens, wildlife, books and memory.
Piketty about Inequality

Piketty about Inequality

As world leaders prepared for COP27 in Egypt, the acclaimed French economist, Thomas Piketty, warned in Le Monde, “It is impossible to seriously fight climate change without profound redistribution of wealth.” He echoed an earlier UN report. There’s a vicious

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The Long Stillwater

The Long Stillwater

The Long Stillwater is a chapter Robert Morris, M.D. wrote to celebrate a love of nature from a trove of memories. Stillwater is hardly a dictionary word, but it made sense yesterday as I floated on a mirror-perfect patch of

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Scavengers in my Yard

Scavengers in my Yard

Deer munch on our flower borders, strip foliage to head height, and rub bark off trees with their antlers in the rutting season. We grumble yet feel sad coming across a beautiful animal that died on our property after a

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Last Flight of the Marlins

Last Flight of the Marlins

Memories of the Canadian wilderness forty years earlier were still sharp in Dr. Robert Morris’s mind as an old man in the 1930s. A pioneering New York surgeon, he was also a distinguished naturalist, horticulturist, and poet. One day in

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Tracking Whimbrel

Tracking Whimbrel

An elegant shorebird with a lovely piping call of the wild. After they leave their breeding grounds in the tundra,  Whimbrels stop to feed on fiddler crabs in the mudflats of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. By October, they leave

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Jamestown is drowning

Jamestown is drowning

Historic Jamestown celebrated Archeology Day today with various events and demonstrations to make history seem more authentic. Artifacts discovered on the island in the past 30 years give glimpses of how the first English colonists lived before they moved to

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The Boy Who Could Bee

The Boy Who Could Bee

Why should anyone care about my debut novel for middle-grade schoolchildren? THE BOY WHO COULD BEE was inspired by poring over my beehives and written under a pen name. When I recalled my uncle in England visited the famous monk-beekeeper,

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A tornado not heading to Oz

A tornado not heading to Oz

Suddenly Uncle Henry stood up. “There’s a cyclone coming …” he said. Thus, began Dorothy’s voyage over the Kansas prairie with her dog, Toto, carried by a tornado. The first warnings were the wail of the wind and bowing grass.

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Queen Elizabeth and the bees

Queen Elizabeth and the bees

While observing expressions of public affection and admiration for Queen Elizabeth II from afar, I began to muse about other queens. Queen bees in my hives. They shouldn’t be called monarchs by any stretch in the meaning of royalty. But

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End of Second Elizabethan Age

End of Second Elizabethan Age

We are no longer Elizabethans. This view is one of my first memories, from sitting on my father’s shoulders as the golden state coach paraded along the Mall after the Coronation. A symbol has passed that lent a sense of

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World Honeybee Day at a Meadery

World Honeybee Day at a Meadery

Plans for the morning were interrupted when I heard the Silver Hand Meadery in Williamsburg was filling glasses for all-comers this morning. And why? It’s World Honeybee Day on the third Saturday in August. The calendar event has gone international

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Night Flight

Night Flight

Do you fly at night sometimes? I flew in my dreams last night with arms outstretched for gliding over rooftops. I didn’t see any birds although on landing back in reality in the morning I learned that an estimated 10,400

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