Oh, isn’t it wonderful? …the garden and the orchard and the brook and the woods, the whole big dear world.
~ Anne Shirley / L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
This is Anne of Green Places. Like my literary mascot, with whom I share a name, hair color, and tendency to rhapsodize, I'm in love with the world.
As a reader and traveler, I'm hungry for the stories that weave people with their places. As a plant ecologist and amateur naturalist, I especially seek out leafy places. As a poet, I'm enthralled with language. Here is where I'm attempting to alchemize all of this.
What’s in the newsletter?
There are currently roughly three modes to my Substack:
Essays and photography from the places where I live and travel, sent out on first and third Sundays or Mondays. These are currently centered on Grenoble, France, where I'm working as an ecologist, and the surrounding French Alps.
More science-focused essays about concepts from ecology or biology, inspired by my own research or the ecology of my surroundings. Posted more or less alternately with place-based essays on first and third Sundays/Mondays, but don’t count on a pattern, or a hard boundary between the two.
My Detail Diary, short lyric meditations on sensory details from my surroundings (mostly nature). I post these daily on Substack Notes and recap them in my newsletter on the weekends that I don't post an essay.
You may also see wanderings into literature, music, and my adventures (struggles) in learning French. To anything that seems off topic, I say, everything is embedded in a place, and everything is ultimately veined with green.
Why subscribe?
Long story short, if you’d like to receive email broadcasts of my forays in the physical and written world, with loving attention to detail and special access to the French Alps, subscribe!
Anne of Green Places does not currently have a paywall of any kind, but if you feel moved to support me monetarily in my writerly endeavours, the way is open to become a paid subscriber. You might get a small literary thank you gift…
And/or, share Anne of Green Places with someone you think would enjoy coming along. It truly means a lot to me!
Where to start reading?
Some thoughts upon my arrival in France:
Grenoble: First Impressions
Novelty is a special experience, a perk of being human. Moving to a new country is like drinking from a novelty firehose. Just looking at your GPS dot hovering in the middle of France on Google maps is a thrill, the surreal beginning of constructing this new wing of your identity. And arriving in the city where you’re going to live is like hatching slow…
Adventures in the Alps:
The garden and the glacier
First, a note: this post marks the anniversary of my first 6 months writing on Substack about the green and human places I love and live in. I’m having a blast, and want to include as many people as want to join the journey. So, if this newsletter resonates with you, do share it! And if you haven’t subscribed, and you want a biweekly dose of green plac…
Visions from the field: Three days in the Alps
Hello! This is an oodles-of-photos one and is very likely going to be clipped by email; if so, click on the title, or follow the “View in browser” link, or tap on “Read in App” to see the full version.
Plus a dose of French language and endeavoring:
Precarious Undertakings
Grenoble is the gateway to the French Alps. It is less than an hour’s drive from the closest ski stations, and you can even get public transport to most of them. The second-most common follow-up question to the one about where I live is thus whether I ski. In fact, I don’t. Despite living within a couple hours of ski resorts for most of my life, I only …
Ecology highlights:
All the plants in the Alps
Hunched on a granite crag jutting out of a glacier on Mont Blanc, 3500 meters above sea level, is a round-bodied, pale-flowered cushion plant that, until a few years ago, no one had given a name. Almost 250 years before, the first botanist to lay eyes on it, th…
There may be branching: The Tree of Life
I have a celebrity crush on the evolutionary Tree of Life. I’m not sure how else to put it. Ever since I was first introduced to this metaphor for the tangled, prolific family of living things on earth, I’ve been enamored. I remember, as a teenager, plunging into an interactive digital museum display of the Tree of Life that blew my mind. (You can find t…
An introduction to my Detail Diary (see the full archive on the Detail Diary tab):
Detail Diary
I want to tell you about something. A few weeks ago I had a little lightbulb-thunderbolt moment that got me so excited I thought about it all day. It started with my recent water-testing of Substack Notes. Well, really, it started with my lapsed practice of writing down sensory details every day, first during the early days of pandemic lockdowns and on …
And finally, before I started Anne of Green Places, I wrote for several years about living in Cambridge, England, at The Cambridge Placebook. If you like Anne of Green Places, you’ll like its predecessor! I’ve crossposted a few:
Graduating from Cambridge
As I mentioned in my first post on Substack, I have another blog, The Cambridge Placebook, where I still occasionally post my backlog of Cambridge content. So here’s a little inivitation to hop over to my latest post there, where I regale you with the ceremonial details of what it’s like to graduate from Cambridge, which I did in April. There may be a s…
Ascension Parish
Dear friend, Because today is the fifth Sunday in October, I decided to honor the symmetry of my posting schedule and share something a little different in the meantime. Below is one of my favorite (and highly seasonal) pieces I wrote for my previous blog, The Cambridge Placebook.
