Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses. Unless mentioned, all links should be free of paywalls.
essay: Gastrodome: M Is For Mushroom (Timothy Burke/Eight By Seven) About growing, foraging, cooking, and eating mushrooms. “I feel sorry sometimes that mushrooms end up a substitute for meat in vegan and vegetarian cuisines, but I understand why. A bit of that is texture and umami. They feel alive somehow, with a kind of density and body to them that clearly is not vegetable or fruit. I’m not entirely clear why, but maybe it’s that otherness that has lately led me to use mushrooms less often when I cook. They almost always announce their presence in food, clamoring for top billing, and yet unlike almost everything else I’ve been prone to eat and cook in my lifetime, I feel as if I understand them less as time goes on.”
Field Guide to August 2026 (Vermont Center for EcoStudies) Affixing tiny trackers to migrating Monarch butterflies; social, parasitic, and pollinating wasps; and one of my favourites, primrose moths!
article: The Often-Overlooked Ovenbird (Laurie D. Morrissey/The Outside Story/Northern Woodlands) “Even though its coloration and habits are similar to those of a thrush, the ovenbird is a member of the wood warbler family. … If you can get a look at the top of an ovenbird’s head, you’ll see an orange crown bordered by black.” Love to hear them in the woods.
short essay: Sixty minutes in a public library: Another round of focus aerobics, this time for “ambient companionship” (Rosecrans Baldwin/Meditations in an Emergency) “Maybe that’s what I mean by ambient companionship, a sense of encouragement and solidarity to be absorbed from quiet sociality, even if my neighbors are simply reading magazines. And being alone in the presence of others — I think it simply feels good to my nervous system.”
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