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In the hidden history of Connecticut’s Charter Oak
my colleague Doug Still and I uncovered several things: the facts, the legend, and then the legacy. Doug and I had fun producing an episode about it all for his podcast This Old Tree. You can tune in to the podcast here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2044179/12144180. Oaks get pretty famous all over the world. Austin, Texas, has the…
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I’m a little child who’s lost in the woods
of miniaturization. Sinatra sang that line–well, not the last part. That’s the hand of Hubert Lengdorfer with one of his marvelous miniatures. There are a lot of people out there creating these tiny environments, whether they’re called shadow boxes or doll houses or dioramas. I can’t help being attracted to small, perfect rooms. I guess…
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Rock steady baby
sang the Queen of Soul, back in the day. Why am I so attracted to the desert’s blasted, the desiccated, the half dead? The mistletoe hanging on for dear life to the tree no longer alive. Zombie cacti. The juicy rind left behind. Mysterious fissures. Perhaps because in the tiniest organisms you see the pulse…
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Been doing some thinking about squirrels
and especially squirrels as pets. John Singleton Copley painted his delightful subject, nine-year-old Daniel Crommelin Verplanck, in 1771. You can visit with the imp at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and I often have. Perhaps because I’ll dealing with some especially dark subject matter these days in my professional life, my mind likes to veer when…
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It is Someone’s birthday today.
Someone important. A good day for strolling among the cacti. And the art. The community of Carefree is a good place to be carefree on a birthday. The botanical garden is small and sweet. Unusual plantings. The miracle of water in the desert. Back east we have tree protection, and I’ve done a lot of…
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An iconic tree in the imagination
or in memory or right in front of your eyes can be remarkable. Trees can be so personal, loved by an individual, as well as public and admired by many. Almost everyone, I’ve found, remembers one particular tree—it burns in hindsight as vividly as any madeleine Proust ever consumed. I’ve realized this in teaching arborists…
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An isn’t-the-world-perfectly-beautiful moment
as the first violin sounds a note and the rest of the musicians in the orchestra respond, just before the conductor steps out and all on stage smile forward, ready to go. The conductor of the Phoenix Symphony, Tito Munoz, hails from Queens and has been leading his pack here in the Southwest for nine…
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Same old same old
wonders close to home. Yes, when your sometime home lies at the mouth of Boynton Canyon in Sedona, and snow dusts the ancient red rocks, of course everything is wondrous. But when I worked at the Grand Concourse in the Bronx last year, I thought is was pretty marvelous, too. Look, see, absorb. Yes, the…
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What are your dreams for the new year?
What are your hopes? What are your prospects? What do you want to leave behind? I like to prolong the transition from old year to new as long or longer than the next guy. My tree stays up throughout January. Our decorations include quotes from favorite poems. Auden, You shall love your crooked neighbor/ With…
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Gulls get a bad rap but they are so freaking cool.
Saw two with fish on the secret bridge recently. One flew overhead, the shiny wet corpus dangling from its beak, the other perched on the bridge railing, head tilted back, chugging its catch. Gulls love to hunt from this Bailey bridge, a cool structure that was invented by British engineer Sir Donald Coleman Bailey during…
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Magical miniatures everywhere you turn
at New York Botanical Garden’s annual Holiday Train Show. A smart novelist named Christopher Moore said, Children see magic because they look for it. Yes, especially on Christmas Eve. Today. If you want to conjure up A Visit From Saint Nicholas, by another writer named Moore, Clement Clark Moore, go to the New-York Historical Society…
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Dreamscape
is the best word to describe the remarkable images photographer Patrick Tierney captures while roaming around his native Los Angeles. Mainly in the dark. Many of his subjects project a kind of glow from the inside. Makes me think of the creepy Tom Waits song: What’s He Building In There? Often featured, something I love,…