The Guide to (Wild)Life

Want to become inspired about nature? Go out, get messy? Check out Terry VanDeWalle's "The Guide to (Wild)Life," where he discusses his two new pocket guides and his adventures in the outdoors.


Turtles in Your Pocket and Frogs and Toads in Your Pocket by Terry VanDeWalle

An Interview with Carl H. Klaus: Part 1

Weathering Winter extends the spring-to-fall narrative that you gave us in My Vegetable Love into the winter months, not traditionally seen as active gardening months. Tell us why it was important to you to write about the winter months.
The put-downs of winter are so legion, I thought it was time to give the season a fair shake—time to challenge Shelley’s dismissive proclamation that “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” As if winter had nothing to offer in its own right except as a prelude to spring. In other words, I wanted to take stock of its distinctive sights and sounds—the snow falling, the birds flocking at the feeders, the icicles forming and melting. I also wanted to challenge the commonplace notion that a gardener’s life in the Upper Midwest begins in the spring and ends in the fall, as if the itch to grow and tend things depended on a rising or falling thermometer. Gardening, after all, goes on throughout the winter months—under cloth, under straw, under snow, in seed trays, in cold frames, and in greenhouses as well as in the dreams and plans of gardeners galore. 

Seed catalogs are a sign that winter may not last forever. What are some of your favorite catalogs? How do you decide which seeds to order?
The opening sentence of this question exemplifies the habitual tendency to think of winter as a season to be endured rather than enjoyed—and therefore to regard seed catalogs as an aid to endurance rather than a genuine source of information and pleasure. I usually receive about two dozen catalogs and skim through most of them to discover new herb, vegetable, and flower varieties as well as new aids to gardening and sometimes even new gardening techniques. But when it comes time to order, I generally favor a handful of catalogs, namely Johnny’s Selected Seeds (located in Maine), Vermont Bean Seed, Gardener’s Supply (in Vermont), Seed Savers (in Iowa), Jung Seeds (in Wisconsin), and Territorial Seed (in Washington).  My seed-ordering decisions are based largely on past experience—i.e., on records of how individual varieties have performed in my garden and of how they taste to my palate.  So, having gardened in my present spot for more than forty years, I’m inclined to rely mostly on my tried and true favorites, particularly given the idiosyncrasies of my soil and my salivary glands. But I always try a handful of new varieties, just for the pleasure of a surprise and a possible favorite in future years.

Carl H. Klaus, Weathering Winter: A Gardener’s Daybook

This Week in Iowa Nature

Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, and Orion is a prominent winter constellation.

Jean C. Prior and James Sandrock, The Iowa Nature Calendar

Plant of the Week

Prairie coreopsis
Coreopsis palmata Nutt.
other common names: tickseed, stiff tickseed, stiff coreopsis
Coreopsis: from the Greek, meaning “having the appearance of a bug,” referring to the buglike shape of the seeds. The common name tickseed also refers to the ticklike shape of the seed.
Palmata: means “palmate,” like the fingers radiating out from the hand or “palm,” referring to the shape of the leaves
Daisy family: Asteraceae (Compositae)

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

This Week in Iowa Nature

Holiday travelers along Highway 30 in western Iowa will cross the major drainage divide separating the Missouri and Mississippi watersheds; the marker is at a roadside park just east of Arcadia in Carroll County.

The Iowa Nature Calendar, by Jean Prior and James Sandrock

Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

From "Winter Break" by Jon Hassler

Christmas Eve with my father’s people in Omaha, during my boyhood, was invariably stiff and unfestive, whereas we always spent a jolly Christmas Day at the O’Kelly farm. Not that the Edwardses were unkind or inhospitable. It’s only that the O’Kellys, by nature, were more spontaneous and high-spirited. The minute we entered the farmhouse, we heard stories so uproarious they must have been invented, though they usually began or ended with the phrase “Swear to God.” The laughter and tall tales continued through dinner and into the evening as more aunts and uncles and cousins came pouring through the house to greet us. Any given Christmas, we probably saw thirty-five O’Kellys.

A Christmas Eve conversation, on the other hand, followed a serious, predictable line, beginning with the unreliability of the weather and leading on through the deteriorating condition of their ailing friends and neighbors and automobiles. As a boy, I considered this talk painfully dull, but over the years I learned to take a certain pleasure in the constancy of it—the way you will sometimes come to appreciate the cheerless old hymn in church simply because it’s so familiar. I suppose, as we age, any sign of permanence consoles us, no matter if it bores us besides.

Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee 

Holiday post from Christmas on the Great Plains

 From "The Christmas Offering" by O. E. Rolvaag, translated by Solveig Zempel

It was Christmas Eve and the moon shone brightly. The sharp, biting north wind burned the face. That same wind had worked itself into a fury far, far north of all human habitation. It had stormed down over the whole northwest of Canada, taken in all of North Dakota in one fell swoop, hadn’t even given itself time to catch its breath and look around, before it raged far to the south in Minnesota. Here it took it easier, whining around the eaves, whistling down every lane, stirring up every little heap of snow it could find, but still burning just as cold as it had when it left the area up under the North Star. “What a cold north wind!” everyone remarked as soon as they came inside and could speak. “If we don’t get more snow, and that right soon, everything will freeze solid!”

In a low, one-story house on a back street in Greenfield, an old couple sat by the Christmas Eve table. They were eating in the kitchen, and that was good enough for them, for here everything was clean and shiny and freshly polished for the holidays. All the nickel on the stove shone like a mirror, there were freshly ironed curtains at the windows, a new white paper fringe on the clock shelf, and the floor had been scoured and scrubbed so that one scarcely dared to step on it. The door to the little living room stood open. There the fire crackled so merrily in the stove that the north wind was put to shame as it blew along the walls. Another door led from the kitchen into the bedroom. That room had to get along on the warmth it received from the other two.

There was plenty of food on the kitchen table: lutefisk, lefse, rice cream, and coffee with extra tender Christmas cookies to go with it, everything that was necessary according to good old Norwegian tradition. The lutefisk was so delicate that it shook like aspen leaves in the wind when one barely touched the plate.

Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee