Our resident cottontails devoured these lovely winecups. Undeterred, I celebrated Earth and Arbor Days on my knees, planting hardy varieties of penstemons for the black-chinned hummingbirds thrumming in my microwild, alongside milkweeds and columbines (a family of deer soon snipped the pale yellow flowers). The Microwild, a concept I developed in “The Light Between Apple Trees,” is a fragment or scrap of nature that is large enough to sustain notable biodiversity in plant and animal communities. In my scrap of nature, this diversity looks like a tarantula hawk wasp blown in by the wind, a green-tailed towhee on the trail of a dung beetle, and a bobcat sheltering by a stucco wall near apple and apricot trees. The bobcat was seen slipping away when the fruit trees were watered.

Where I live, all eyes are on the Santa Fe International Literary Festival. I’ll speak about the Microwild on Saturday, May 16th, in conversation with Laura Paskus. On Sunday I’ll attend talks by Susan Orlean, Rebecca Solnit, and other wonderful authors. It will be a weekend of urgent and meaningful conversations; the festival sets the bar higher each year and never disappoints.

I am reading “The Glorians” by Terry Tempest Williams who spoke beautifully at the festival last year.

Caleb Zakarin did an Earth Day interview with me in collaboration with the New Books Network: https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/ideas-podcast-the-light-between-apple-trees

The morning after the festival, I’ll hit the Botanical Garden. Happy planting, everyone!