desert

A season of butterfly lilies

Lovely white with red and pink markings butterfly mariposa lily (Calochortus venustus) by Betsey Crawford

The way Earth tosses beauty about fascinates me. She doesn’t save splendor only for grand vistas and awe-inspiring mysteries. She spreads it at our feet the minute we leave the pavement we are so attached to. She invites us to pay deep attention, often to the smallest of treasures. She strews exquisite mariposa lilies in the unlikeliest of places.

Native language

Bald cypress adapts to growing in water in this wetland ecosystem in the Shawnee National Forest in Illinois by Betsey Crawford

When I started my landscape design business in the 1980s the staff at plant nurseries nicknamed me ‘the weed lady’ because I kept asking for plants that most people were removing. As much as I could, I wanted to plant the grasses and wildflowers, trees and shrubs native to the glacial moraine known as Long …

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Mysteries at my feet

Coyote resting under creosote bush outside of Death Valley, California by Betsey Crawford

The lines showed up one morning, on a section of my walk where the sand, driven over by a tractor, is unusually soft and easily shows imprints of desert wildlife. Lizard tails, I thought. I checked carefully for signs of tiny lizard feet but didn’t see any indentations along the lines. About a mile on, …

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Rights of nature

When you look at the mountain above, your reaction is likely to be colored by what is most important to you. Skiers may think of the thrill of the trip down, climbers of the trek up. Mining executives of the coal or metals to be found there. Road engineers of the challenge of finding a …

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The solace of deep time

In his 1981 book, Basin and Range, John McPhee gave us a good analogy for the scale of deep time. Stretch out your arm sideways, and imagine that the 4.55 billion-year timeline of earth’s history runs from the tip of your nose to the tip of your middle fingernail. A quick swipe of a nail file would wipe out human history. …

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Sowing seeds into the whirlwind

Learning, on yet another election night, that progress is not only not remotely linear, but that the way is often bewilderingly and heartbreakingly tortuous, with far too many backward strides, I was reminded of Wendell Berry’s poem, February 2, 1968. He wrote it three days into the disastrous Tet Offensive of the Vietnam war, in a year that …

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