What’s this all about?

We have fifty acres of land in central Vermont. This website documents our attempts at making this land resilient and healthy despite seemingly endless invasive plants, pests, and pestilence, and all the perils of climate change. The text and photos are by me. All photos were taken on our land except for the one of the handsome oak tree that graces this page’s background—a four-hundred-year-old sessile oak in the Forêt de Fontainebleau. Feel free to download photos but please do not use them commercially in any way. Noncommercial uses are welcome under Creative Commons License BY-NC-SA.

I am not an expert. I have a bit of practical experience in environmental law and ecology, but no training at all in environmental science, horticulture, or forestry. Until I was nearly 30 years old I could not tell an ash from an elm, let alone Dicentra canadensis from Dicentra cucullaria. I love our land, though, and do my best.

My efforts are often frustratingly curtailed thanks to a chronic pain condition—the cheerily named “burning limb syndrome,” or erythromelalgia—and it is only because of my amazing wife Emily that we have made any progress here at all. Thanks Emily!