The Forest Unseen is celebrating its one month birthday. I’ve not used this blog to announce every tid-bit of news about the book’s first steps in the world, but here I’ll give a short overview and look forward to some upcoming events.
Upcoming lectures and signings: In the next few weeks I’ll be in Knoxville, Nashville, Denver, Oxford, Pulaski, and Santa Cruz. Lauren Kirchner, writing in Capital New York, reviewed my lecture last month at the Explorer’s Club in NYC.
Reviews: the book’s website has a more complete listing, but two of the more detailed discussions are Hugh Raffles in the Wall Street Journal and Gina Webb in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. Closer to home, Chapter 16, an organization devoted to Tennessee’s writers and readers, published a review by Michael Ray Taylor this week.
Other media: I’ll be on the NPR show, To the best of our knowledge the weekend of April 28/29. Frank Stasio from North Carolina Public Radio’s State of Things ran a nice long interview last week. Right after the book came out, the Gary Null show and Lewis Frumkes (show not yet archived) also did radio interviews. In addition to the book trailer, Penguin has uploaded some clips of me getting perhaps a little too excited about snails, soil, and hickory nuts.
If you’ve enjoyed the book and would like to spread the word, please tell your friends, put a review on your blog, or put some comments on Amazon. Thank you!
And now back to our regularly scheduled Ramblings:
This morning, I found some dwarf crested iris is in bloom in Shakerag Hollow. Unlike the tidy flowers of early spring, these blooms are frilly, complicated, and showy. They can get away with such extravagance because more insects are out now — in the bad weather of early spring, flowers have to be simple (with wide open petals) in order to maximize the chance that something will pollinate them. Bumblebees are the preferred pollinators of this iris species, I think, so their flowers exclude smaller bees and flies. The plants’ blade-like leaves slice up from below-ground rhizomes. Flowers and leaves are barely six inches tall. Cute.
David George Haskell 
There is the similar species, Iris verna, that one can find in more xeric sites. They have longer narrower leaves and the differences in the inflorescence are not there on the top of my head, however they do look very superficially similar.
Hi Sunny, According to Horn et al (and the collected “wisdom” of the internet), verna has erect spatulate sepals. I’m pretty sure this one is cristata. I’ll keep my eyes open for verna. Looks like a purty one.