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Plants

Poetry

King Rail Reserve

Wind-plowed furrows in ice across the marsh. / Cattails frozen suppliant. Loosestrife withered // colorless under a bright but ineffective sun.

By Glenn Stowell March 2024
Poetry

Noah’s Wife

Noah, his swelled head, his ego larger than the ark, his crazy / self-promoting savior mania. Because of him we dropped / everything, sank our fortune in cypress wood, and every / filthy creature we couldn’t trap we had to buy with our last coin.

By Wendy Drexler February 2024
Poetry

Mountain Flowers

When I was sixteen, / pickup truck, load of hay, / there was nothing I’d rather see / from the window than women’s underwear / hanging on a backyard clothesline.

By Robert P. Cooke February 2024
The Sun Interview

Under Fire

Thor Hanson on How Animals and Plants are Adapting to a Warming World

We’ve got changes playing out now with astounding rapidity. Biologists can see natural selection occurring over the course of a field season. . . . Studying these adaptations can help us identify the issues that are most important and the species that need the most help. This may not make us worry less, but it can help us worry smarter.

By Mark Leviton December 2023
Readers Write

Dirt

Shining shoes, spreading gossip, growing plants in prison

By Our Readers December 2023
Quotations

Sunbeams

When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here — the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc. — I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country. . . . To my chagrin I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.

Henry David Thoreau

December 2023
Poetry

Elegy With Adding Machine And Milk

One cold November day / after the lambs were sold / and the wheat brought in, / my grandfather settled / himself at his desk / and punched the numbers / into an electromechanical / adding machine, the gears / whirring and cachunking, / a long white ribbon pooling / on the dusty linoleum

By Joe Wilkins October 2023
The Sun Interview

Burning Questions

Meg Krawchuk On Our Changing Relationship With Fire

A fire manager making a decision may look like they’re in a position of power, but often they really have only one choice: to suppress the fire. If they don’t, they are opening themselves up to a Russian roulette of consequences depending on how the wind blows, quite literally.

By David Mahaffey October 2023
Poetry

Smoke Memories

My mother and I were alone the night / our house burned down. I was nine that summer, / and the smell of smoke clung to my clothes. / And after the fire a tree in the yard / grew crooked with scoliosis, its back bending / away from the remains of the house.

By Doug Ramspeck October 2023
Poetry

The Art Of Living

My fly line unspools across the water like a long sentence / whose final punctuation is a grizzly hackle tied by a friend. / He clamped his fly vise to the branch of a fallen pine / right after we arrived by mule train at this Montana river.

By Erik Reece August 2023