Renaissance Naturalist
Environmental Memory – Water in the Wash
In perusing a recent volume of the journal Environmental History, I became interested in a paper about how water was used, both practically and rhetorically, by laundresses over the turn-of-the-century period. And as I went into my laundry room off the kitchen, threw...Catsteps in the Loess Hills: Read the Art
Catsteps, a regional term for a staircase-like feature in the landscape of the Loess Hills of Iowa, elsewhere known as terracettes. They are parallel to elevation contours much like agricultural terraces. These step-like sequences of small ridges are formed when the...
Gardening under the Paschal Moon
By Barbi Hayes The Pink Full Moon arrives on April 16th. Pink – not for its pale color – rather for the pink moss phlox that blooms in early spring. This diminutive flowering ground cover provides valuable early season nectar for swallowtail butterflies, day...
RIME Ice – dense fog – Geese
By Barbi Hayes Even at mid-morning, the fog was so dense the road disappeared into a cloud bank – and the bridge at Lake Flanagan sensed of the Mists of Avalon. The morning was hovering below freezing in the 20s with a brisk wind from the north – the...