Urban Ecology Outsider
A botanist explores overlooked wild places in the city and beyond
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.
