by Charles W. Bier I don’t know when I first began to really know trees. As a youngster, I was literally a snake-in-my-pocket sort of kid. Yeah, could not get enough snakes in my life. I was blooming as a broader young naturalist in my later elementary years, and I do remember leading a walk for a small group of people on some open land near where I grew up north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On that walk I remember being asked the identity of a smooth, light grey barked tr

by Becky Barak Many of my plant love stories are actually stories about teachers that helped me see the world in a new way. High school biology class was maybe the first time I started thinking about plants as really, truly alive (and now I’m a botanist, so I guess we all grow up). My teacher had taught us about transpiration -- the flow of water up from the roots of a plant all the way up to the leaves -- against gravity and driven by evaporation. On the way home from scho