Priscilla M. Jensen

Dec 26, 2024 | thespectator.com | Priscilla M. Jensen |James Heale |Christopher Booth |Vazha Tavberidze

I must have seen it in a movie, one of the old black and white ones: jovial carolers coming into the manor, brushing the snow off their shoulders and stamping their feet. Or rosy-cheeked sledders whacking their boots against the doorstep as the fluffy stuff obligingly disperses. That’s not the way it works in north Georgia, where I remember about four or five childhood snows. Soggy, 35-degree snows. Snows that bring down pine trees onto every powerline in ten counties.

Nov 27, 2024 | wsj.com | Priscilla M. Jensen

Carly Allen-Fletcher has drawn a picture of the Big Picture, turning her imagination to the six classifications of life forms that scientists call kingdoms: plants, animals, fungi, protists, bacteria and the mysterious archaea. In “Kingdoms of Life,” she identifies each, with vivid examples and brief descriptions of what characterizes them.

Nov 27, 2024 | wsj.com | Priscilla M. Jensen

McCall, Idaho, had a big problem in the late 1940s: More people were moving into the area, but beaver activity was flooding their newly planted orchards and farmland. Luckily, a local fish-and-game warden named Elmo Heter was unusually imaginative and practical. In “When Beavers Flew,” Kristen Tracy describes Heter’s solution: “to relocate the most troublesome” beavers to the backcountry more than 80 miles away.

Apr 5, 2024 | wsj.com | Priscilla M. Jensen

‘In April 2008, I was botanizing at the foot of the Boraldai mountain range in Kazakhstan”—stopping to smell the roses knows no boundaries. And as Christina Hart-Davies tells us in her charming almanac, “The Herbal Year: Folklore, History & Remedies,” the benefits of herbs and flowering plants go beyond their scent or appearance. Ms. Hart-Davies, a writer and botanical illustrator whose watercolors enliven her book, is at pains to say (and say again) that she is not giving medical advice.

Nov 1, 2023 | wsj.com | Priscilla M. Jensen

‘Amazing grace,” intoned the eulogist, and repeated it. He began to sing: “how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me,” and the congregation, a bit startled, joined in, as the pianist scrambled to accompany them. The singer was President Barack Obama, who had been addressing mourners at a 2015 memorial service for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney and eight parishioners, African-Americans murdered by a white supremacist during Bible study at their Charleston, S.C., church.