How trees talk

You’ll never experience a walk in the forest the same way again after viewing this eighteen minute TED Talks lecture (June, 2016) by professor of ecology Suzanne Simard who explains how she used hard science (while out-running grizzlies) to discover trees talk to each other. From identifying “mother trees”, the hubs of vast symbiotic mycorrhizal…

Want the real dirt? Watch this.

Forget celebrity train wrecks or political scandals. Real dirt, the kind under everyone’s feet, can be riveting. Before your eyes start rolling into the back of your head or you make a quick flick over to Facebook, watch Symphony Of The Soil. OK, maybe it’s not the most tantalizing of titles but this documentary is…

What cliffs and sidewalk cracks share

Southern Ontario just got our first dump of snow and even though it’s only added up to a few centimetres (sorry, Buffalo), I’m already feeling nostalgic for green and growing things. So discovering a posting on David Suzuki’s website about eco-connections between urban and natural environments such as pavements and cliff faces, gutters and streams, was a…

Hunting swales

I love a good swale. They’re so when-you’ve-got-a-lemon-make-lemonade. In garden geek terms, a swale is a shallow ditch. But it is a ditch transformed. A regular run-of-the-mill ditch catches the rain as it sheets off a gentle slope (like a lawn-covered front garden, for instance) and, in the case of suburban ditches like the one…