Garden Journal
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Bio Profiles
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A memory of a nursery in Holland stayed with me over the years. I couldn’t fully remember the name or location until it appeared on a social media feed in the past year. I don’t recall exactly what the post was, but it caught my attention and triggered a memory: I had found De Hessenhof again!
I watched the elm for many years.
It stood tall and pristine, a straight trunk over fifty feet high and nearly two feet wide, and I knew what was coming. Dutch elm disease doesn’t rush; it arrives slowly—a yellowing branch, then another—thinning the crown and taking branches one by one. Each season, I examined it more closely—not just for its decline, but for its shape, its structure, and what it had already made.
A childhood memory from my dad’s greenhouse, where a single jade leaf quietly taught me what propagation — and vocation — could mean.
I don’t often see this moth during the day. When I do, it’s pressed against the pale bark of a willow or young cottonwood, with wings folded tightly and body angled upward, as if it grew there.
At first, it disappears.
I usually notice this one only after it has already stopped moving.
Pressed flat against bark or siding, the wings held open and still, the moth looks less like an insect and more like pattern—something woven into the surface itself.
Sometimes weeks pass before spring feels believable.
When the forecast still calls for single digits Fahrenheit—or dips toward –20°C—and winter hasn't loosened its grip, my mind is already listening for peepers, one of the first signs that spring has finally arrived.
That thin, rising chorus drifting from ditches, vernal pools, and low woods is one of the earliest true signals that the year is turning.