Topophilia

The heart of this blog

Topophilia, n. Love of, or emotional connection to, a particular place or physical environment.

Hi. This is Anne of Green Places. My name is Anne. Let me introduce you to my places.

I live on an ancient lakebed between the foot of the Wasatch mountain range and Utah Lake, in the Provo River watershed, on the edge of the Great Basin, whose rivers never reach the sea.

Provo River, Wasatch Mountains, Rock Canyon, Mount Timpanogos

Before I returned here in January 2026, I lived for three years in a glacial river valley between the limestone spine of the French Pre-Alps and the granite teeth of the Belledonne range of the Alps, in the watershed of the Isère, a tributary of the Rhône, which flows south to the Mediterranean Sea.

Belledonne from the Chartreuse; Vercors; Isere River and Belledonne

Jardin du Lautaret, Col du Lautaret

Before that, I lived for four years between chalk hills and fenland in the curve of the River Cam, which joins the River Great Ouse to drain into the Wash of the North Sea. From afar, I made a scientific home on the opposite side of the earth, in the mountain shrublands of the Southern Alps, New Zealand.

River Cam at Grantchester Meadows; King's College from the Backs; chalk grassland on Devil's Dyke

Hugging a hebe in the Rock and Pillar Range, Otago, New Zealand

Before that, I lived five years in the same watershed I live in now, as a student scientist. I practiced by learning the redrock labyrinths of the Colorado Plateau, the joshua tree plains of the Mojave desert, and the alpine meadows of the Cascades.

Canyonlands National Park; near Lytle Ranch; Oregon Cascades

Before that, I lived two final years with my parents in the sagebrush steppe of the Snake River Plain, in the basalt footprint of the Yellowstone hotspot, whose river joins the Columbia to drain into the Pacific Ocean.

Henry's Fork of the Snake River in Harriman State Park; Teton Range; Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone

I lived the bulk of my childhood amidst a grid of irrigation canals and the scattered remnants of wetlands in the center of a vast valley bounded by the Sierra Nevada and Coast Range, near the Tuolumne River, tributary of the San Joaquin River and its estuaries that drain into the San Fransico Bay.

Pacheco State Park; Yosemite

I was born in hilly terrain on the Huron River, which drains into Lake Erie, but I have no memory of this place.

Tell me about yours?

Anne of Green Places is, essentially, a blog about where I live. I started this blog when I moved to Grenoble, France, propagating it under a more versatile name and purpose from a place-specific blog I wrote while in Cambridge (The Cambridge Placebook). As long as I was living in Grenoble, Anne of Green Places could incidentally be branded a France blog or a European travel blog or an Alps blog, but that was an ephemerality. Now I live in Utah, but it’s not a Utah blog. It’s about being in the place where I am, and giving my attention to it.¹

People often ask me, since returning to my native land, if I miss France or Europe. Of course there are unique gifts to living there, and it was hard to say goodbye. Of course I sometimes feel tender about it. But I knew, even in the midst of that goodbye, that I have a tendency—is it a talent?—to mold myself to the present, to be occupied with and centered in my current context. And thanks to the place-savoring skills I’ve honed while living in and writing about more “exotic” locales, I’m confident in my ability to be fascinated by any place, even a long-familiar one. It’s not even really about those skills; it’s inherent in the millennia of complex layering that has made every place what it is. Geology, ecology, and history exist equally everywhere, even if they manifest differently.

And yet, the relationships we build with our own specific places matter. Those relationships aren’t interchangeable, and they don’t disappear when we leave. This is something I’ve relearned during my current transition, one of the bigger thresholds of my life so far.²

Here’s something I wrote while anticipating my departure from Grenoble, feeling a keen sense of anticipatory loss:

Lately, when I scan the spine of the Vercors massif splaying the horizon with white, hunchbacked winter; when I look out my office window at the rooks winging by in companionable scatters to their rookery, and at the bare tuliptrees etching their scribbles on the pastel sky; when I sit at a crowded table in the office lunchroom (the cafet) amid the collage of French chatter; when I hear the ding and whine of the tram pulling into the stop down the street; when I cycle the labyrinth of the medieval city center by moonlight and across the glinting river; when I walk another loop around the arboretum and smell the rain lifting sweetness from the leaves—it’s with the feeling of floating in a river that’s about to abruptly run dry, despite flowing, for the moment, as it always has.

I’m not worried about settling into a new flow in a new place, but the fact is I can’t be in two rivers at once. I can only take with me the tracks this one has made in my topography. Unless I start over here, any future contact will only come in dips, like a skimming bird.

That loss of presence was real; our finitude is real. But now, in my new flow, I look back through that trove of sensory memories and the network of experiences and people that taught me what Grenoble was, and I feel rich. I love the shape that river gave me. Just as I treasure the River Cam, and the Snake, and the San Joaquin.

This is a blog about where I live, and by extension where I have lived, because all of those places have made me who I am. They’ve taught me how to love a place.

A year ago January, I wrote a post anticipating my final year in Grenoble, which also turned out to be a handy introduction to what I’m writing about here.

I’m unpinning that post now, since it was oriented toward that specific period, but I’m sending you there nonetheless if you want to hear more about the details of what I mean by Place and why I’m interested in it (and what plants have to do with it). In that post I walk through this brainstorm-flowchart-thing I made about the elements of Place:

And I describe the categories of my posts, to which I still aspire: Detail Diary, place essays, plant profiles, and miscellany (poetry, notebook fragments, etc).

When it comes to merging my creative and professional interests, I foresee in my new position as a professor both the biggest potential and the biggest challenge I’ve yet encountered. I can shape my research around getting to know my local ecosystem; I can order the 7-volume Intermountain Flora with my research money; I can plan field trips in the local mountains (or the Alps); I can be curious and get paid for it. At the same time, I have to find ways for these interests to result in papers and funding. I have to balance more demands on my time than I possibly ever have. For the colleagues and supervisors assessing my work, writing a blog is in the “that’s nice” category at best, especially as it strays into non-scientific or interdisciplinary territory. But my university also cares a lot about students, and about holistic, experiential learning, which is so well embodied by place relationships, especially in ecology. I want my students to find for themselves the same kind of curiosity that drives me to write here, so I will do my best to model it.

We’ll see what I have time for in the coming months (and years). Here’s a list of ideas from a recent Detail Diary post:

• Tracing the spine of my Wasatch mountain horizon, from Mt. Timpanogos to Mt. Nebo (the highest peak in the Wasatch)

• Botanizing and birdwatching in the local canyons and wetlands

• Learning my watershed: all the rivers leading in and out of Utah Lake, the shallow, freshwater little sister of the Great Salt Lake (plus the highs and lows of restoration efforts)

• Following the Provo River from Wall Lake in the Uinta mountains to Utah Lake

• Collecting the vestiges of Provo’s history preserved in its architecture

• Studying the settlement trajectory of Utah Valley as agriculture gives way to suburban developments crammed between lake and mountains, and my family’s part in this story over the last two centuries

• Learning the stories of Utah Valley’s Native American tribes

• Stoking appreciation for the vast wilds of the Great Basin

• Exploring what happens when you combine desert and high elevation (the Colorado Plateau)

• Comparing and contrasting the Rockies and the Alps—geology, flora, climate, glaciation history, human land use, etc.

Meanwhile, plants may regain their ascendancy on this blog as I prepare to teach Plant Diversity. Echoes of France will likely/hopefully mix in with Utah exploration, if my backlog has anything to say about it. And maybe I’ll occasionally cast back further, to the watersheds of my youth.

See you there!

1. Consider this new phase a proof of concept for the project.

2. In case you need to be caught up, I moved to Utah this year to start my first permanent job as a professor of plant ecology.