To a casual observer, the picture above is a simple, perhaps quintessential, representation of Spring: a fresh green plantlet sprouting from bare earth. To me, it represents far more. The plant depicted above is a Dicentra  — either squirrel corn or Dutchman’s britches (I’ve yet met a botanist who can distinguish the two species by their foliage alone). Dicentras  are rich cove specialists, meaning they grow in pockets of moist forest with neutral or alkaline-trending soils.

One of Earth’s great spectacles is coming to a patch of woods near you. For the past 10 months, multitudes of tubers and bulblets have...

Appropriately, Turk’s cap lily seeds look like gold coins. Inside each coin is the genetic material to produce their famously large and...

My parents visited last week. They live in Boston, and it was the first time I’d seen them in 15 months. In recent years, with the...