My last year in the Alps

How I want to spend it + New mountains on the horizon

Hello! If you’re a new or recent subscriber to Anne of Green Places, this post will be a good orientation to the newsletter. If you’re a long-time subscriber, it will be a little recap of what it is I call my “niche.” Oh, and a very exciting update!

A personal update

A year is a slippery thing (ever more so with age). And yet there’s something very human, something both tractable and substantive, about this Sun-circling, season-bound parcel of time. It’s just enough time to say goodbye to a place: an endpoint close enough to comprehend and make the time precious, but enough space to breathe and choose how to spend it.

I’ve lived in Grenoble, nestled between three mountain massifs at the edge of the French Alps, for almost two years. In just about a year, at the start of 2026, I’ll be trading the Alps for the Rockies¹ and returning to my home turf to become a professor in the Biology Department of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

The timing feels right in many ways. I’ve been abroad for six years already including my PhD in the UK, and I’m beginning to feel ready to return to familiar, family-adjacent territory. Although I anticipate an extremely steep learning curve, I’m excited to take the next step in my career. And I’m ready to build a relationship with a place and its people for longer than a handful of years.

I have a headstart with Utah Valley, having been a summer-visits grandchild and later a college student there. I’ve absorbed generations of family history and imprinted on the landscape enough to call it one of my homes already. Next year will begin the work of putting down the roots of a fully grown adult there.

Of course, this means leaving behind the adventure that is France.² That unavoidable tradeoff is softened by the gift of this year. One more year to go on hikes, speak French, work on my travel bucket list, try restaurants, go to bookshops and markets, go down local history Wikipedia rabbit holes, deepen friendships, and track the details of one more round of seasons. In that same year I’ll be writing scientific papers, teaching ecology workshops, and preparing to transition from supervisee to supervisor of a research group. And I’ll be writing here.

It’s a lot to ask of one whirl around the Sun.³ For my eyes to be bigger than my stomach when it comes to energy for projects, exploration, and enrichment is a well-worn pattern of my life, so I already know I’ve overpromised to myself, and most likely you as well. But we’ll think of all these good things as a menu to choose from—can’t go wrong.

So what’s the menu for Anne of Green Places? Taking a step back, what is Anne of Green Places? What will it be this year, anyway? As I envision my final year in this particular green place, it behooves me⁴ to re-clarify my vision for the newsletter, both for myself and for you lovely readers—whether you’re new here or not.

A conceptual tour of Anne of Green Places

Recently I was tasked with presenting to my blog to a small group of undergraduate biology students. It got my wheels turning a bit. As a lead-in, I asked them a few discussion questions that started from our shared subject (ecology) and traversed the myriad overlapping subjects that I’m boldly calling my “niche.”

1) What is ecology?

The textbook answer: ecology is the study of the interactions between living things and their environment. We brainstormed a few of the basic organizing elements of ecology and came up with a diagram something like this:

My research interests fall somewhere between community and ecosystem, center squarely on plants, and hover between evolution and ecology. All of this seeps into this blog, particularly the Green contingent. I’m an ecologist, and I want to tell you stories about plants. (Here’s one: All the plants in the Alps.)

But this is not all: Ecology can’t exist without Place—and (mostly) vice versa.

2) What is a place? What gives a place its identity?

Ecology is a huge wing of Place, but a human concept of place brings in additional layers. Some more brainstorming:

This wordcloud is far from exhaustive, but you can already see how I’m justifying eclecticism in this blog! But it’s true, my fundamental interest lies in how disparate subjects like architecture and agriculture and military history and ecology can be shaken and spun together and resolve into this tangible, experiential, time-tumbled living thing: a place.

I deal mostly in places that I have personally experienced; those I’ve formed a relationship with.

3) What shapes your relationship with a place?

There probably exists some kind of collective meta-identity of a place made up of hundreds of dimensions like the ones in our above brainstorm, but each of us only has our own limited set of data points with which to form our idea of a place. This is true for places you know intimately and for places you only visit for a day, places the size of a city or a mountain range or a single grove of trees—and even places you only know from books/documentaries/social media, i.e. the stories others tell. (More on that in a moment.)

But only personal experience can explode those points into multiple dimensions.

Writing this blog and weaving my personal data points into stories is one way that I nurture my relationship with the Green Places in my life. I know I just said personal experience is the best way to know a place, but stories are second best. Stories are an inevitable and beautiful part of your dataset for any place. Why not have more of them?

Research and documentation aside, I hope you will find surging through my place stories a vein of deep, universal human curiosity about where it is we find ourselves. A longing to be at home in this physical world that we share with so many others.

So, there could be yet another brainstorm bubble about storytelling—and wordcraft, and poetry, and photography, and voiceovers. But I haven’t made one yet.

How all of this might materialize in your inbox

Over the next year, I plan to keep funneling all these interests into a few types of posts—more or less what I’ve already been doing. My goal is to send something three weeks out of four, and usually no more than weekly.

1) Detail Diary

My Detail Diary is a daily practice I (re-)started over a year ago of capturing visual and other sensory details from my surroundings in photographic and poetic form. It fits squarely in the lower lefthand corner of the blue “relationship with place” bubble. It’s simple and grounding and has become a mainstay of my daily life and the blog. Can recommend!

The daily bits are over on Substack Notes, and I bundle them together in a monthly recap post here in the newsletter (one coming this weekend!). You can browse past recaps here.

2) Place essays

This is storytelling mode full blast, where I tell you about a place I’ve gotten to know while exploring my region (the French Alps, give or take). These stories could take the form of hikes or strolls in local neighborhoods, a meditation on trees inspired by an art exhibit in a 16th century convent, a bookshop specializing in mountains, a braided essay about a garden and a glacier, fieldwork in the Alps, trespassing an abandoned fort, or a museum full of skeletons, to name a few. (See my full archive of place essays here.)

Count on photos, at least a dash of historical context and/or art and/or literature, and hopefully some plants. Mountains a major theme.

To be honest, these essays have slowed down in the past year relative to my original vision for the blog. This is partly because I keep coming up with new side projects for the blog, and partly because they take a long time to research and write. I’ve accumulated quite a backlog of places I would like to write about, but I don’t plan to hold them to a strict schedule. So appreciate them when they come!

Some drafts and ideas currently cooking:

• A field trip in Vanoise National Park: alpine flowers galore + a bit of history about the French National Parks.

• A visit to Mont Blanc + four generations of mountain photography from the Tairraz family

• Visiting The Magic Mountain (Davos, Switzerland + wildflowers + Thomas Mann)

• The arboretum behind my work building where I walk almost every day

• The city park I just discovered on top of a vestige of 19th-century city wall

Not to mention the places I have yet to visit!

3) Flora Alpina

One of my projects at work deals with plant diversity in the Alps, but in an abstracted computer-model way. To get on better terms with the plants, I started perusing the Flora Alpina, an atlas of all the plants in the Alps organized by evolutionary history. Now I’m taking you all on the journey, if you’re adventurous enough. We started with a very old branch of the plant tree of life, the lycophytes, and have met some weird ferns and some common ferns. The conifers are almost ready.

This series may seem like a bit of a departure from Place. There is some Place here, as these plants help make the Alps a place. But it does lean more Green. The bottom line is I love nerding out about plant evolution and simply want to spread the joy.

And lucky me: Plant Diversity (my favorite class as an undergrad) is one of the first courses I’ll be teaching as a professor! So this doubles as a bit of prep.

The problem is that there are many, many more plant groups than I have available weeks, given everything I want to write about. So we’ll see how far we get. And despite this I may occasionally branch into other planty subjects. (See the full Plants archive for more.)

4) Notebook fragments

This is experimental; I’ve only done one of these so far, on a week when I didn’t have anything else ready to post. I thought it would be a bit of a throwaway—little bits from my writer’s notebook, a poem, some links. But it turned out to be a gem, and even had a theme. So I’m probably going to do it again.

PHEW! Lots of choices on the menu.

Above all, I want to relish this place for my remaining year in it. When I move, I’ll relish my new home. Anne of Green Places will adapt, but the heart of it will be the same.

If you’ve made it this far, consider sharing the post/blog with other place-lovers, plant-lovers, and story-lovers. The more the merrier!

1. Specifically, the Wasatch range.

2. Not to mention wherever else in Europe I could have wandered to next, let alone elsewhere in the United States, a country equally if not more brimming with unfamiliar places to learn—BUT all the possible alternate timelines of my life are beyond the scope of this essay.

3. This is on top of asking society to continue to function at a certain baseline of stability. Something of a prerequisite to my little plans in their current form.

4. One of the difficult-to-translate French phrases I miss the most in English is “Il faut…”—we have to, we should, it’s necessary to, it’s a good idea to…it behooves one to…