Art Culture Politics
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But No Defense For Us
These posts are usually scheduled to publish in advance of the date. Yesterday I was barely awake before I saw the news from Las Vegas. By then my post for the day was up and running. But I can’t just put up another nature post today. It’s been too awful a week, another nadir in…
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Calling Names
Robert Macfarlane’s essay on nature and children, naming and literature, got me thinking about the first big book I read myself. It was Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which is, of course, three books. I was ten-ish, a late bloomer. As it happens, a new book called Flora of Middle Earth also delves into the name…
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Eclipse!
Some parts of the United States will see a total solar eclipse today. This will be a lifetime event for many. The superstitious, Republicans, and other ignorant fools may want to stay inside: the Sun God is very, very angry with them. Here at Backyard & Beyond, we’re only getting a partial eclipse. (And this…
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Torrey 150
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Torrey Botanical Society, the oldest botanical organization in America. Namesake John Torrey was a Columbia College physician, chemist, and botanist. His 1819 Catalogue of Plants Growing Spontaneously Within Thirty Miles of the City of New York and his A Flora of New York State (1843), among other…
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Wild Pigeons
“When an individual is seen gliding through the woods, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone,” so wrote John James Audubon on the Passenger Pigeon, which is of course now long gone. Audubon — who cribbed from Alexander Wilson more than…
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Beasts of Mesopotamia
The Morgan Library and Museum also has a marvelous exhibition entitled Noah’s Beasts: Sculpted Animals From Ancient Mesopotamia. In the nookish Thaw Gallery until August 27th, the exhibition is gem-like. Like Thoreau, so well represented nearby, the unknown sculptors were profound observers of animals. The lion’s gaze meets yours. (Not much bigger than a baseball, the…
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Inexhaustible Thoreau
Forty-seven manuscript volumes, seven thousand pages, two million words: the journals of Henry David Thoreau have been edited, extracted, and analyzed over and over again. Beginning with himself, since he used his journals for notes and drafts of articles, books, and speeches. It was his practice to write every day (life, of course, made exceptions);…
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Mouse of Walden
“Someone memorialized Thoreau’s small friend by drawing a mouse on the the back of his door,” writes Laura Dassow Walls in her magnificent new biography. In honor of the Thoreau bicentennial and the mouse at Walden Pond, I asked my friend Marion to draw one on the door to my apartment. Meanwhile, in Antarctica: Larsen…
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HDT200
Born two hundred years ago today, David Henry Thoreau entered the world some 182 years after Concord was settled by English colonialists. What a half-way point for America! Concord’s establishment was, by the way, half a dozen years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: the Puritans were reluctant to move inland. At first.…
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Birthday Boy
Tomorrow is Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday. This was his journal entry of March 23, 1856: “I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me. Very significant are the flight of geese and…
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