LANDSCAPE DESIGN
When I was in fifth grade, I designed a hedge row for my parents as part of a school project about habitat. That summer, I borrowed the neighbor's tools and planted a few dozen shrubs - quince, viburnum, forsythia. Today, the hedgerow is an unruly, raucous swath of color. When I visit home, I watch brown thrashers zoom in and out, and rabbits nibble in confidence, knowing that they can duck back under cover when the red-wing hawk makes a pass.
I've had the good fortune of experiencing landscape design as both vocation and avocation. I love building drystone walls and creating outdoor living spaces. These days I am particularly interested in designing gardens in to accommodate climate change in seasonally dry climates
CURRENT READINGS
Recently, I've been reading Benard DeVoto's essays about the West - the western U.S - and specifically about public land in the 40's and 50's. His writing captivates me because if we were to change some of the names and dates, DeVoto is telling the same stories of conflict over public land that are unfolding today. Ranchers at odds with federal land managers, industry muscling it's way into public lands, calls for divestment.
Still, the essays give me hope in the sense that they remind that brave, thoughtful individuals have prevented divestment and checked industry's role on public lands in the past. At the same time, the essays also make clear that nothing is a given. The integrity of public lands is fragile and always at stake.
HORSEMANSHIP
I got my start in forestry behind a team of Belgian draft horses. Casey and Dan. To this day, the most fun thing I can imagine is logging with a team of horses on a bluebird Maine winter day.
I grew up riding in Maryland, discovered draft horses in Maine, and am currently learning about Vaquero horsemanship.
There are many life lessons in learning to work with horses, but usually I am reminded about teamwork. Horses will do incredible, dangerous, exhausting things if we ask them to. Moving massive logs and plowing fields, for instance. Horses demonstrate to me time and again how much richer, how much more enjoyable teamwork is - the process and the outcome - when you listen, feel, cooperate, and work together.
You cannot save the land apart from the
people, or the people apart from the land.
// Wendell Berry