Do you have shelves groaning with scientific tomes, and stacks of guidebooks on every horizontal surface?
Are your walls adorned with nature-themed photos and artwork, or scientific charts and diagrams?
Do you have a refrigerator or bulletin board covered in fun nature stuff?
Do you have old birds’ nests or heaps of shells and pinecones on your window sills, little drawers full of feathers, butterfly wings and dead beetles, or lichen-covered sticks in every vase?
Do visitors to your home think you are a little (or a lot) eccentric?
And will your children someday laugh (or cry) when they have to dispose of all your troves of dusty nature treasures?
Photos welcome!
This bulletin board serves no purpose other than to inspire joy:
Photos and cameras adorn free surfaces in my house, bags of birdseed clog the garage, the bookshelves are decorated with field guides, on the “art table”, I am always working on some clay bird or painting (current project is a clay northern gannet which I started in November 2023 and never get around to finishing), while the finished figurines can be found on shelves.
2 field guides at my elbow (for yesterday’s obs on iNat). Wooden hoopoes and a skein of carved birds from Namibia. Linen scroll with New Zealand birds. Metal gull sculpture. Saharan sand roses, coral and shells.
Thru my windows a garden planted for wildlife and view of the mountains I hike. Woven basket of fragrant fynbos leaves from my garden. Linocut of a Cape robin-chat. Paintings of fish and a seascape or 3.
But wait, there’s more!
How does your home reflect your passion for nature?
It doesn’t. I used to collect things — posters, animal skins, etc. I was basically building a home nature museum. But every time you move, you learn to purge things. Eventually, you realize that possessions are the mooring lines of life, and the only thing that matters is human connection. Besides, real nature museums do it better than I ever could!
Speaking of home nature museums, they only benefit the people who visit your home. iNaturalist allows for potentially permanent records that benefit everyone in the world.
Now, you can do both: you can have a wonderful home nature museum, AND you can contribute a lot to iNaturalist. I just wanted to share a minimalist take on “home passion for nature”.
Oh, I know about purging things. But I tended to purge non-nature things first, unless I knew I would need them. Each time my home library got smaller, its percentage of field guides and biology- and ecology-related volumes got larger.
In my younger days, I went through a rockhounding phase. I don’t think any of those collections are still in my possession anymore. Every now and then, I miss those days, but there is so much nature to experience in the present, I can’t pine for the past for very long.
Now, if I was at my place in the Dominican Republic, I would show you pictures of my fruit trees and other plantings. I would rather copy the locals with their passion for flowers than copy my expat neighbors with their passion for lawns and paved patios.
From my wall art, to the coffee table books, to the gardens outside and collection of wintersown plants waiting to be planted. Ke everyone times I’m eccentric
I consider the Foxfire series to be must-haves. Reading them is like being a kid again, listening to my grandmother, the rest of her generation, and even older relatives sitting around chatting.
My yard is a mix of veggies, fruit, and wildlife garden. I’m even willing to battle my local clay soil to have happy Penstemon spp in the yard, and the effort pays off in native bumblebees. We also get bats in the summer (yes, this meme is totally accurate), and hunting swarms of dragonflies are a regular occurrance.
Inside the house? Field guides, local ‘best hikes’ books, gardening guides, an amazing number of books on paleontology (since neither one of us actually works in the field), and a pervasive Odonata motif. I may be a wee bit obsessed…
