I have a wee Meyer Lemon tree in a pot, and it’s been languishing all winter. It’s been on the botanical equivalent of the fainting couch. It turned yellow, and wan, and there were no flowers this year. It has been a Very Very Sad Lemon Tree. But in the past few weeks, it’s been rallying. A little Miracle Go (I know, not organic, but easy, available, blue!) and it started to perk up. Then I put it in the back hall with a grow light, and started taking it outside into the greenhouse shed in the afternoons when it…

One of the things I’ve been working on for the last year, ever since Helen MacDonald took the top of my head off with H is for Hawk, is trying to figure out why there’s been this vibrant resurgence of nature writing in the UK, but not here. I came out of the US nature writing wave of the 1980s-1990s — I was the grad school factotum for the first two years of the Art of the Wild writer’s workshop at Squaw Valley, and that group of writers — Gary Snyder, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Gretel Erhlich, Ted Hoagland, Louis…

Lighting out for the territories. It’s one of the core stories of our national identity, and especially among those of us who did leave the places where we grew up, who ran off to be ski bums and raft guides and lead groups of kids on wilderness trips. It wasn’t just an adventure we were after — we were going to completely reinvent how to live. We’d show them! All those people we left behind in those suburbs with the office jobs. We were going to be authentic. Real. We were Huck and Jim, deciding not to go home, but…

A new little series of mostly-unedited thoughts, the publication of which is inspired by my old friend and mentor Louis B. Jones’ Diaries that he’s been publishing, intermittently, for ages. A couple of new sets just dropped, and I thought, maybe I’d be brave enough to throw out these unfinished ideas I’m working on as I walk Hank every morning, along this mile or so of creek just that feeds into the Yellowstone. Because my day job has gotten busy again, I’ve taken to dictating into the Notes app on my iPhone using the little microphone icon. The voice-to-text is surprisingly…