I went on a long hike with my partner last weekend, all the way to the end of the land at Pennant Point (Crystal Crescent Provincial Park). The hike takes us through dense coastal spruce forest, then winds along dunes that border the popular sand beaches. After a half hour we reach the rocky coast where the bulges of granitic bedrock are exposed. as we head closer to the outermost point of land, barrens become the main landscape....

Plant Scent Mysteries Part 1. Soon after moving to Halifax in the early 2000s, I noticed a curious pheonomenon: every year, around the beginning of August, a curious scent would envelop the neighbourhood where my university is located. To my nose, it was an exotic, heady, almost incense-like scent, not quite floral but sweet, almost honey-like; intriguing and not unpleasant. My friends, however, generally describe it as "like cat pee". One person's incense is another's animal urine, I guess...

I just spent several hours weeding my naturalized front yard. But isn't it all weeds anyway? It's probably time to explain this project. In 2008, we'd had enough of paying for oil to heat our house. We decided to put in a geothermal heat pump to replace the oil furnace. This method of heating a house is more efficient than oil, natural gas and air-source heat pumps, taking advantage of the constant temperature deep underground (~11 degrees C, regardless of the season)...

Two weeks ago I visited a friend in Toronto. It was early spring after a cold winter but this was finally a sunny day. My friend Marina took me on a walk through her favourite urban trails. We spent about five hours on both the wide official trails and numerous narrow side paths winding through the East Don river valley...

Salt marshes are a key feature of the coastline in Nova Scotia. Where conditions are suitable, these wetlands exist at the threshold between land and sea. The grasses that form the main vegetation cover in salt marshes are specialized on areas where they are periodically flooded by the tide, but at elevations high enough that they are not permanently underwater. They are only found in wetlands periodically flooded by seawater; these plants are specialists. Botanists call these salt specialists "halophytes"...

I'm obsessed with the tiny plants that grow in sidewalk cracks. This topic never became my main research area, but I've done a few projects here and there. While I was participating in an urban plant project in a suburb west of Tokyo, I learned that a Japanese scientist Hirokazu Tsukaya (塚谷裕一) had written an entire book documenting the flora of cracks.

For years, I taught undergraduate courses on botany, plant identification and ecology. Our fall teaching semester went from September to early December. Where I live in Nova Scotia we have a late fall, so there was still a good deal to explore plant-wise in our outdoor lab sessions as late as October. We would visit different habitats with distinct vegetation, provided that we could get there and back within the three-hour timeslot allocated to our labs. Even in November...

For just over 18 years I worked as a university professor at a small, mainly undergraduate university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During the summers, there were often more than 10 people associated with my research lab: fourth year honours research students, graduate students...

For just over 18 years I worked as a university professor at a small, mainly undergraduate university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During the summers, there were often more than 10 people associated with my research lab: fourth year honours research students, graduate students...

The Psednos gulliensis is just short of four centimeters in length, with a pinkish body and a dark-coloured head.

The average household bill will go up by $9.28 per month starting this month, and by another $5.11 per month starting in April.

Brookfield Growth division piled US$250 million into Musk's US$7.1 billion equity raise for the deal

For the first time in 20 years, Nova Scotia Power’s most senior officials are not participating in the public hearing that will determine whether many of their customers see rates jump this year and n...