I think every biologist has a favorite kind of organism. For some people it is a charismatic animal, like an elephant, or a whale. For me it is silverswords. I first learned about these plants in my first year of graduate school. Someone was giving a lecture on adaptive radiations, and showed photographs of a…

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…