Current Issue of The Fringed Gentian™
Fall/Winter 2020
Newsletter archive - all back issues.
Sign-up for email newsletter notification and informational emails from us.
Eloise Butler sets her hat on fire. Article.
How the Friends Invasive Plant Action Group has restored this habitat. Article.
Selected from the many species in, or historical to, the Garden.
Link on name goes to more information and photos of this plant.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~
“We of the machine age admire ourselves for our mechanical ingenuity; we harness cars to the solar energy impounded in carboniferous forests; we fly in mechanical birds; we make the ether carry our words or even our pictures. But are these not in one sense mere parlor tricks compared with our utter ineptitude in keeping land fit to live upon? Our engineering has attained the pearly gates of a near-millennium, but our applied biology still lives in nomad's tents in the stone age. If our system of land-use happens to be self-perpetuating, we stay. It it happens to be self-destructive we move, like Abraham, to pastures new.”
Aldo Leopold, 1933, from The Conservation Ethic