AGAIN AND AGAIN, as I was reading the recent book “Bad Naturalist” by Paula Whyman, I kept thinking: Good thing I only have a couple of acres of land. Whyman tackled 200 acres on a Virginia mountaintop, dreaming of reshaping it, she writes, into “a native plant paradise, a model of conservation, a meadow that would inspire Julie Andrews to break into song.” But the natural world often has other things in mind than the ones on our to-do list, doesn’t it? On any scale, all the lessons nature delivers—lessons like ones about invasive plants, or about the unstoppable forward march of succession, about the impossibilities of enforcing concepts like control or perfection—are lessons hard-earned, and I talked with Paula, who shared some of her takeaways from years of ecological experiments on the land. Paula Whyman is an author, including of the award-winning book of short stories titled “You May See a Stranger.” These days she lives in the Blue Ridge foothills in Virginia on the piece of land that is the subject of her latest book, “Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop” (affiliate link). Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the […]

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