"May something go always unharvested! May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left, So smelling their sweetness would be no theft."

Robert Frost, 1936

My Christmas tree plantation is now a faded field of dreams. Five hundred balsams, row upon …

The afternoon sunset glows pink, reflecting off my windowpanes at 3:45. Against the lethargy of the approaching winter night, I trudge uphill into the gathering gloom, carrying a sack of wood shavings, a folding chair, a steel can of diesel fuel, and a box of wooden safety matches in my pocket. …

A boyhood discovery turns out to be the gift of a lifetime

The unmistakable scent of balsam was exotic to me when I was a boy, growing up on a street planted with ornamental hardwood trees in the crowded suburbs of northern New Jersey. The “Christmas tree smell” represented a …

What we learn from our elders if we make time to visit.

Do you remember the celebrated New York City “Survivor Tree?”

New Yorkers found the stub of an ornamental Callery Pear buried beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center towers after the September 11, 2001 …

With arm’s sweep, US Forest Service Research Forester Bill Leak gestured at the thick regeneration of beech, yellow birch, and sugar maple crowding a 30-year old clear-cut on the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest and said, “The northern hardwood forest is Nature’s answer to armor-plating …