“A changed planet
is not just coming.
It is already here.”

HALEY E.D. HOUSEMAN,
in letter from the editor

We are nature-blind. Humans are, for the most part, consumed by our to-do lists and our personal survival in our exclusively human society. Yet even in the most concrete-covered cities, the natural world breathes and grows, shaping our lives. It is all around us, in wild growth and in potted plants. It’s the birds in the sky, but also a thousand invisible other lives, microscopic, crawling, stretching. READ MORE.

“By the end,
there's no
​hero left.”

CLAIRE COMSTOCK-GAY,
​in essay, Megaflora

I grew up inside a small gray house, and outside the house grew a tall, white pine—much thicker than my body, much taller than my house. This might be one of the biggest white pines in New Hampshire, a contractor told my parents when they brought him out to see about cutting the tree down. READ MORE.

“By the time I left Delos,
the sea was in my blood.”

LAKSHMI RAMGOPAL,
​in essay, A Guide to Delos

In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, a pregnant Leto turns desperately to Delos in her search for a safe place to birth Apollo. Every other island in the eastern Mediterranean has shunned her, fearing the power of the deity she carries. Delos is her last recourse. READ MORE.

“If we have access
to a smartphone, we
have access to the
​history of a place.”

MISSY J. KENNEDY,
​in essay, More than Surface

My brother the geologist shuffles in his sandals to kneel on the earth. He sifts some of it into his cupped hands, lifting the white sand to his mouth to taste. “Salty,” he notes, marveling. The White Sands National Monument is a gypsum field, an assemblage of bone-white sand dunes rippling in slow motion within the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico—the northernmost reaches of Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert. As a sand, gypsum is dissolved by rainwater, but here the air is dry enough to halt one of nature’s own processes. READ MORE.

“Being able to chart the turn
of the year from where I stood
in it was a kind of nostalgia
​for certainty I could live inside.”

ALEJANDRA OLIVA,
​in essay, By Any Other Name

I used to pride myself on knowing both kinds of names: the names that scientists gave to plants, Viola tricolor and Daucus carota, and the names that were given to them by old wives, or maybe even Adam himself. Names like johnny-jump-ups and Queen Anne’s lace. One name made me feel expert; the other told me about the plant itself. Johnny-jump-ups were bright, wild, little pansies, springing up from corners of the garden near the fence posts, popping up where you hadn’t planted them.
​READ MORE.

“The scientific word for mold propagation is to colonize.”

CHANELLE ADAMS,
​in essay, The Archives Need to Breathe

NOTE FROM THE EDITORS:
This essay is exclusive to the print issue.

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Claire Comstock-Gay 
@MmeClairevoyant

Lakshmi Ramgopal
@lykanthea

Alejandra Oliva
olivalejandra.com
@olivalejandra_

Chanelle Adams
chanelleadams.info
@nellienooks

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NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: This issue was funded via Kickstarter in August 2018. A portion of our proceeds went toward reimbursing the editorial staff for upfront costs as well as paying our writers. The bulk of our funds went to printing costs, reward production, and shipping fees for the project. We also made a donation to local organization SEED, ROOT + BLOOM, which supports BIPoc nature and herbal education in Boston. To read more about how we made this issue happen, head here.

We were also awarded Second Place in Self-Published, Illustrated at the 2019 New England Book Show.