23 Comments
May 31, 2022Liked by Rob Walker

Try iNaturalist (free app), to I.d.flora and fauna. I made it a mission at onset of pandemic to scan every inch of my property with the app and a notebook in hand and phone camera. That and also a good native plant book for your region. Your library will have those. Join a Naturalist or outdoor club if you can. People love to teach and have so much information on hand to share. Have fun!

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Oh I love the idea of noticing the flora and fauna you don’t like. Personally, I’m NEVER happy to see a begonia. These flowers are BORN looking a little spent. And they just get worse from there. I find them extremely disheartening.

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May 31, 2022Liked by Rob Walker

Thank you for sharing my blue tweets! Thanks also for linking back to the earlier post on bioregionalism; somehow I had missed that and now I'm off to take the quiz linked in that and to put Jenny Offill's Weather on my library list. Her book How to Do Nothing was great.

Another part of relating to the land we're on can include knowing which tribes lived there traditionally and may still be present, what plants and animals they relied on for food, fiber, and other needs, and what has disrupted those relationships. Braiding Sweetgrass taught me that the Syracuse salt potatoes I had recently discovered and started cooking as a regular family favorite have a dark past that continues into the present with the effects of salt mining. A map that's often shared for finding traditional tribal lands: https://native-land.ca/.

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Jun 3, 2022Liked by Rob Walker

Hi Rob - Thank you for this newsletter!

A variation on your prompt that I enjoy is to not look up the name of an unknown plant (though I often do that later) but to first make up a fitting name for it myself. I think it helps me pay more attention to a plant's individual characteristics - color, scent, etc. - but also its general character & how it relates to its surroundings. An example: there's a wildflower that blooms nearby late in the summer; they look like Black Eyed Susans but with flowers all around each stem. I don't know their real/scientific name, but they'll always be "Lazy Susans" to me!

I got this idea from another On Being episode, Krista interviewing ornithologist J. Drew Lanham. He talked about first learning about birds from his grandmother, who taught him their colors and calls, as well as her names for them - names just as meaningful and real as the ones he later found in birdwatching guides.

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Jun 3, 2022Liked by Rob Walker

I'm pretty plant-savvy—I do a lot of gardening in my shaggy, often overgrown yard—but I've been trying to get more weed-savvy. I spend a lot of happy hours outside pulling weeds and making the yard and garden a bit more civilized, but it occurred to me a while back that I should at least learn the names of what I was pulling, rather than "that many-leaved thing that pulls out easily but sticks to my clothes and makes me itch" (catchweed, or bedstraw, it turns out). I like being able to put a name on them—it's a little bit of respect to pay a living, thriving thing before I put it in the big black garbage bag.

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Jun 1, 2022Liked by Rob Walker

Not so much a fan of Poison Ivy, mold and pollen. But love roses, tulips, lilacs, daffodils, holly bushes with red berries, apple trees, weeping willows, cat-o-nine tails, and a lot more!

For The Missing Word: I would call that a layover.

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Rob, I loved this email, thank you. Weirdly I kept meaning to ask you about your lack of interest in nature when you mentioned it ina previous newsletter. At some point last year I became obsessed with identifying as much stuff (mostly plants but also birds, bugs and trees) as I could in my local area. I'd think about you and this newsletter often, because noticing one thing always led me to notice something else fascinating or new. This week I found a woodpecker nest (after noticing a sound at first I thought were my favourite bird in the park - kestrels), which has been a source of great joy!

I have been toying with the idea of setting something up called The Nature Notice Board to help other people do the same!

I started by just scanning stuff using the Google Lens feature on my phone and then I'd do some more in depth research and write it in a nature journal (which I only started this year). It blew my mind how much stuff was edible or had a medicinal use. I'm now doing a diploma in foraging and am a local volunteer park ranger!

Would love to hear what people discover from your prompts. I'd also recommend iNaturalist and Merlin if you don't have Google Lens, which isn't always accurate (but SUCH a useful tool I don't think enough people know about).

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It's a ridiculous cliché, but I genuinely stop and smell every rose. We're fortunate to have several highly-scented ones in our garden - Blue Moon is my favourite - but as I walk around the neighbourhood, etc. if I see one and can legitimately sniff it I will. A simple way to briefly stop, inhale something spectacular and live for a moment.

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May 31, 2022Liked by Rob Walker

I don't have a variation but loved this - thank you for the reminder to embrace the outdoors a bit, to cultivate knowledge outside of and away from our screens.

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May 31, 2022Liked by Rob Walker

Opening this script was a door I needed to open! I’m currently living in the gorgeous forests of NC and discovering so much about plants and birds and water flows and bears and beauty! Thank you, I will keep opening more doors on my trails !

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May 31, 2022Liked by Rob Walker

Great newsletter this week! Love the reminder to think about attention as our entryway.

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Wonderful post and powerful reminder that we take care of things we love and we love things we know. Teaching ourselves, and our children, to know and love the natural world around them is so important. I often write about what I consider the four essential connections of a Heartspoken Life, and our connection with Nature is one of them. Robin Wall Kimmerer has articulated this primal connection with Nature so beautifully.

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