Tonight, at home, in front of the screen. A man in his sixties climbs a stepladder in a botanical garden, pushes a branch aside, and clips a small metal clamp onto a ginkgo leaf. The cable runs back down along the trunk. For any viewer, it is a strange image. For me, it is a […]

In December 1996, a mudslide comes down on the hamlet of Stafford, in Humboldt County, northern California, and devastates the village. The slope above it had just been clear-cut. The residents blame the logging company, Pacific Lumber, and the engineer Donald H. Gray concludes that the clear-cut was responsible. A few months later, the California […]

Kudu are dying in southern Africa, and nobody understands why. They have been browsing acacias, as always. Except that the trees, over-browsed, concentrated the tannin in their foliage to a lethal level, and warned their neighbours through the air. The episode is real, dated around 1990, and it was Zep’s son, Arthur, who reported it […]

July 1993, somewhere in a British Columbia forest. Young trees planted in groups of three, fifty centimetres apart, are sealed one by one inside bags. Some are capped with a conical tent of varying opacity, put in place four weeks earlier, to give them an artificial sky, full sun, partial shade, deep shade. Then gas […]

In 2008, Monica Gagliano is a postdoctoral researcher in climate change ecology at James Cook University, and she spends her days in the water tracking the breeding of wild pairs of Pomacentrus amboinensis, a reef damselfish. After a week, the animals come to nestle in her open hand, her fingers closing gently around their scaly […]

A stork’s-bill seed falls to the ground. It carries a twisted spiral awn, and that spiral coils and then uncoils with the humidity of the air. With each cycle, the seed drives itself a little deeper. It screws itself into the earth without the plant having spent a single calorie, all the energy comes from […]

One morning in May 1755, in Uppsala, Linnaeus saw a Lotus corniculatus come into flower, sent to him by François Boissier de Sauvages, a botanist from Montpellier. The plant came from the Mediterranean shores, and it had taken several months to acclimatise to the Swedish cold. Linnaeus returned to the greenhouse in the late afternoon, […]

One evening in Büdingen, during a recording, columns of figures come through. Hans Otto König writes them down without understanding them. It will take time before he grasps what he has been given: six wavelengths, in nanometres, accurate to the decimal. “Hör zu: 935,5 937,8 927,2 948,1 934,2 928,3 nm” He adopted them. They improved […]

From 6 October 2003 to 18 March 2004, every Monday and every Thursday, at ten in the morning, a team fells three trees drawn at random. Forty-eight dates, twenty-four weeks, without ever missing an appointment. Four hundred and thirty-two spruces spread over three Swiss sites, Château-d’Œx in the canton of Vaud on a former pasture, […]

A forester scrapes at an old beech stump with a knife, in a communal forest in the Eifel. The stump is wide, between 1.2 and 1.5 metres across, and the tree that once stood on it was felled four or five centuries ago. Under the surface, the wood is green. Chlorophyll, and therefore life, in […]