Iwas home alone the other evening when I heard a scuttling sound coming from the kitchen. Two mice had climbed up a strut in the woodwork of the sink counter and jumped down into the compost bucket below, which just had a few centimeters ...

My eldest daughter Miwako visited me from Canada recently, bringing with her a large cardboard box full of old letters, field notebooks and field logs that had been stored away somewhere. The oldest of the notes was the log of my first expedition into ...

Thanks to the great Roman naturalist and writer Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79), we know that parsnips were brought to Rome each year from imperial provinces across the Rhine, and that they were destined for the Emperor’s table. The scientific name for the parsnip ...

We leaned back in our seats and gazed at the ruins of the goose. Our hut on Devon Island was festooned with decorations we’d made from toilet paper, and the five of us — the Arctic Institute of North America’s wintering party in Canada’s ...

One of the best perks I get from the wild woods is honey. Mr. Matsuki, our forester up here at the Afan Woodland Trust in Nagano Prefecture, is a beekeeper who prefers to encourage wild Japanese bees — whose honey has a very delicate ...

According to figures given to me by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, about 16 percent of people living in Japan suffer an allergic reaction to pollen from Japanese cedars (Cryptomeria japonica). In the Greater Tokyo area this increases from one-in-six to an astonishing one-in-four people. ...

I was in Britain from July 6 to July 13 this summer, and on the Saturday of July 8, my companions and I stayed at Baskerville Hall just outside Hay-on-Wye, a beautiful and very historic little town in the Welsh county of Powys on ...

It was my first month of living in Tokyo, and I had just about gained enough courage to go into a little restaurant and order all by myself. I had come to Japan to study karate, and had just finished a hard training session ...

When I was a young lad in South Wales I used to collect, press and catalog wild flowers. Then I reached the age of 12 and went to an all-boys school in England, where my seniors soon taught me that flowers were for sissies. ...

Right now, on one side of my house there is a profusion of green growing things and golden daffodils; on the other side there’s the remnants of a huge bank made by the snow that fell off our roof. In the sunshine, that will ...

I spent most of the latter part of March in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have friends and family there, and when the cherry and magnolia trees blossom and the mountains still gleam with snow, Vancouver is a very special place to be. On my ...