Urban Ecology Outsider
A botanist explores overlooked wild places in the city and beyond
I went on a long hike with my partner last weekend, all the way to the end of the land at Pennant Point (Crystal Crescent Provincial Park). The hike takes us through dense coastal spruce forest, then winds along dunes that border the popular sand beaches. After a half hour we reach the rocky coast…
Plant Scent Mysteries Part 1. Soon after moving to Halifax in the early 2000s, I noticed a curious pheonomenon: every year, around the beginning of August, a curious scent would envelop the neighbourhood where my university is located. To my nose, it was an exotic, heady, almost incense-like scent, not quite floral but sweet, almost…
I just spent several hours weeding my naturalized front yard. But isn’t it all weeds anyway? It’s probably time to explain this project. In 2008, we’d had enough of paying for oil to heat our house. We decided to put in a geothermal heat pump to replace the oil furnace. This method of heating a…
Two weeks ago I visited a friend in Toronto. It was early spring after a cold winter but this was finally a sunny day. My friend Marina took me on a walk through her favourite urban trails. We spent about five hours on both the wide official trails and numerous narrow side paths winding through…
Salt marshes are a key feature of the coastline in Nova Scotia. Where conditions are suitable, these wetlands exist at the threshold between land and sea. The grasses that form the main vegetation cover in salt marshes are specialized on areas where they are periodically flooded by the tide, but at elevations high enough that…
I’m obsessed with the tiny plants that grow in sidewalk cracks. This topic never became my main research area, but I’ve done a few projects here and there. While I was participating in an urban plant project in a suburb west of Tokyo, I learned that a Japanese scientist Hirokazu Tsukaya (塚谷裕一) had written an…
For years, I taught undergraduate courses on botany, plant identification and ecology. Our fall teaching semester went from September to early December. Where I live in Nova Scotia we have a late fall, so there was still a good deal to explore plant-wise in our outdoor lab sessions as late as October. We would visit…
Houseplants don’t show up in most ecology textbooks, but over the years they have taught me so much about plants and the ecosystems they inhabit. There are a few houseplants I’ve kept alive for decades. I like cooking, so many of my long-lived houseplants are edible: fresh bay leaf does not in any way resemble…
I was an ecologist before I ever started gardening. It was in the mid 1990s, and I’d finished my undergraduate degree in biology where I focused on ecology and plants. As an environmentalist, I was learning about the importance of local food. This is also when I started really getting into cooking, so I wanted…
For just over 18 years I worked as a university professor at a small, mainly undergraduate university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During the summers, there were often more than 10 people associated with my research lab: fourth year honours research students, graduate students…
Welcome to my blog! Here I plan to tell stories about plants, urban nature, and what these might mean for understanding our place in the world. I first came up with the title and general concept in 2015, and after what can only be described as a heroic act of procrastination, I’m finally ready to…
These represent my own opinions not those of my employers. Posts are © Jeremy T. Lundholm and all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Short extracts may be posted as links to this blog.
