Featured Articles
How to Help Your Best Trees Grow
If we were to arrange optimal conditions for growing the perfect tree, we would provide a site that’s a perfect match for the species’ particular needs. It would begin its life in strong competition with trees of similar size. I’m partial to sugar maple, so let’s assume the tree is…(more)
The Forecast Calls for Birds
Songbirds pouring from the skies before dawn. Thousands of hawks gliding past a mountain summit. Rare oceanic birds blown in to shore. Birdwatching like this doesn’t necessarily begin when you go outside. It begins with a weather forecast the day before. Weather can generate spectacular birding. Consider the spring fallout,…(more)
At Work Milling Ship Masts with “Duke” Besozzi
When Charles “Duke” Besozzi looks at a big tree, he sees bowsprits, masts, and decking in its contours. This is a change from what he used to see when he was a commercial logger for the general market. These days he’s more of a broker, locating the specialty timber needed…(more)
Dirt and Blossom
In the late 1920s, Franklin and Leslie had a lean-to camp in the Toma country, smack in the middle of nowhere at all, back then. Timber got moved on water in those long decades before the lumber companies cut roads almost everywhere. You can drive a car right to the…(more)
How Can I Tell if My Woods are Old Growth?
Old-growth forests, sometimes simply called “old growth,” are just that: really old woods. Accordingly, they are marked by the presence of exceptionally old, typically large-diameter trees that are living, dying, and dead. For most forest types in our region, this likely means there are trees exceeding 150 years old and…(more)
Ghost Moose: Winter Ticks Take Their Toll
The tracks and splattered blood stains in the snow told the story. Hours before, a cow moose trotted through the deep late-March snowpack and, where she passed, drops of blood, patches of hair covered with tick feces, and dislodged ticks revealed that she was host to thousands of winter ticks,…(more)
The Great Glyphosate Debate
It seems almost quaint, or perhaps naïve, to imagine a time, not too too long ago, when black and white film strips proclaimed the wonders of chemistry and suburban children danced gleefully behind fumigators in fluffy, white clouds of pesticide. We live in a more skeptical time today, and for…(more)
Clouds: More Than Meets the Sky
I grew up near the water in Brunswick, Maine, where warm mornings are often shrouded in a thick deck of clouds. On the coastal plain, moist south winds cool as they pass over the chilly waters of the Gulf of Maine, causing blankets of fog. It can be mid-morning before…(more)
From the Center
As you read this, presses are rolling on our newest publication, More Than a Woodlot: Getting the Most from Your Family Forest. The book is written by Northern Woodlands founder and former publisher Stephen Long, with contributions from several other authors familiar to our readers. In More Than a Woodlot,…(more)
Take a chance – win an heirloom!
This continuous arm Windsor chair by Vermont craftsman George Ainley could be yours. Tickets are $20 each and only 400 will be sold. Support Northern Woodlands and buy your tickets today!
Editor's Blog
When Life Hands You Knotweed, Make Knotweed Crisp
Sure, OK, I love the environment. I want a canopy of green leaves to hike under each spring, blossoming wildflowers, pollinating bees, and bears that have plenty of land…(more)
What in the Woods Is That?
Name That Sapling
Sure you can identify the five-needle bundles of the white pine, the ribbed leaves of a beech, and the shiny bark of a yellow birch, but what about the wee…
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The Outside Story
New England’s Other Syrup
In Leicester, Vermont, up a rutted driveway off Route 7, Kevin New cobbled together a sugarhouse out of an old goat barn and plywood. He boiled a lot of sap this spring, long after most sugarhouses had gone dormant.…(more)
Recent Discussions
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Well, yippee-ca-yay! I was actually interested in this article until the author called “blow down”, “WINDTHROW”! Where in the world do we get these people?
Just like the…(more) -
Yikes, this stuff is wicked. I am trying to clean out my over run raspberry patch and this weed seems to find the soil perfect there.I was not prepared for…(more)
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An important feature of Japanese knotweed that you might want to know is that this plant is one of the richest sources of the antioxidant resveritol (also found in grape…(more)
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Meghan, I SO hear you on the Japanese Knotweed topic. When I travel over the Smuggler’s Notch road onto the Stowe side, this noxious invasive starts to appear on the…(more)
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Thank you for this advice. I am about to plant some trees. I recently had a huge poplar crash to the ground. I then noticed wire through it - it…(more)