Bonjour from the Alps

A new home

Welcome to Anne of Green Places, where I write my way through the nooks and crannies of the natural+human world.

Until a few years ago, I never imagined starting my science career (or any career) outside of my home country, the United States—which is big enough to hold near infinite possible futures already, not to mention the beloved Western landscapes I cut my ecological teeth on. Then I was accepted to a plant ecology PhD program at the University of Cambridge in England, and I couldn’t say no. This began my open-concept understanding of where to call home.

Newnham College, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Until a few years ago, I never imagined writing a blog. I was always a writer, but it took the freshness of a new home—one spectacularly saturated with specialness—to prompt me to write to the world right then, and not in some future dream. I started The Cambridge Placebook to put my love affair with that place and all its layers (fen, stone walls, pathways, river, culture, people) into words. The hopes I put down in my first post—that writing (and photographing) my explorations of this home would alchemize words and senses into something more than either alone—proved true, at least for me. Just as delightful was the small circle of readers I managed to bring along for the ride.

Until a few months ago, my next home was completely open-ended. I loved Cambridge, but moving there in the first place had loosened my roots enough to consider going nearly anywhere. And at the end of my PhD, the opportunity I chose to follow happened to take me to France. That’s where I am now, just launching into the making of another new home, this time at the base of the French Alps (and with a new language to learn).

Grenoble, France

There are several corollaries to this new start. One: I have a whole new mountain-ridged horizon to write to. Two: my first blog, The Cambridge Placebook, can’t quite contain this horizon. Three: it’s time for a new, more open-concept blog.

Enter a new platform: Substack. Having enjoyed Substack blog-newsletters from some of my favorite writers for a while now, I’ve decided to try it myself. Though I can’t live in two places at once, I still have more to write about Cambridge, so if I can manage it, The Cambridge Placebook will continue to be a parallel home. In the meantime, I plan to cultivate this new patch on Substack with the same kinds of place-based exploration via words and photos. For now my writing will be centered on Grenoble, the town where I live, but I’m calling this space Anne of Green Places to make room for all the future places and ideas I might stumble on and decide to weave into a story (and to pay homage to my personal literary mascot). Knowing me, a plant ecologist, many of these will be explicitly leafy—but I’m just as interested in what people do with and in the nature that we’re a part of. Everything is embedded in a place, and everything is ultimately veined with green. I love it all.

So, if you’d like to receive email broadcasts of my forays in the physical and written world, with special access to the French Alps, subscribe! My goal is to post the first and third Sunday of every month. Expect prose about walks and museums, photos of mountains and street art, and if we’re lucky, you might get even some book reviews, science, and/or my struggles with learning French in there.

À bientôt!

Col du Lautaret, French Alps

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