Hiking and botanizing are distinct pleasures. Hiking is the joy of pushing one’s body, of covering long distances, of discovering new landscapes. Botanizing is the opposite. It is the joy of moving slowly, of looking closely, of reading the story of a place, and of relishing the discovery of something beautiful or unexpected. On a…

The western coast of Sonora, México is populated by a fascinating mixture of desert and dry forest species. Here the organ-pipe cactus (Stenocereus thurberi) rises over a landscape dominated by Bursera, Ruellia, Jatropha, and a range of other common shrubs. Do any of these species care about each other? Do they co-occur entirely by chance,…

On the winter solstice I chased a retreating moon over western Greenland and the Canadian arctic. On this long westward journey the sun appeared to set two times, and the earth sat in pale twilight glow. Coastal mountains rose up in the darkness, and sea ice filled the fjords that were not yet frozen. In…

A common sight along the roadsides and logging gaps of the lowland forests of Borneo is the slender gray trunk of a sun-loving tree with long, up-curving branches naked except for a few large leaves at the tip. These trees belong to the genus Macaranga, in the Euphorbiaceae family. They seem quite unremarkable, but working…