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Elliot Claire: What kind of baby name is that? A girl's name? A boy's name? Both? Mission accomplished, said Elizabeth and Sean Scotten, of Oakland, Calif., who became parents to [...]

Elliot Claire: What kind of baby name is that? A girl's name? A boy's name? Both? Mission accomplished, said Elizabeth and Sean Scotten, of Oakland, Calif., who became parents to [...]

Picture a redwood forest. The trunks like monoliths. The tree canopy like clouds. The fallen needles: a shag rug piled centuries deep. Now imagine someone has left a busted refrigerator [...]

As a matter of habit, Greg Grant leaves his varmint gun at home when he gives a garden tour. But on a late winter Saturday afternoon in Arcadia, Tex., while [...]

There are 422 living trees for every human on Earth -- 3.04 trillion overall -- and during a couple of weeks each fall, a person can feel plainly outnumbered. Is [...]

Michael Tortorello is writing a blog on the progress of his first vegetable garden in Minneapolis. His posts, including the most recent one, below, can be found at nytimes.com/pages/garden. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ST. PAUL -- What is the value of a dining-room chair? You can't eat it. And you can sit on the floor free, as millions (billions?) of people do. A [...]

The trouble started with an R.F.Q: a ''request for qualifications'' in the bloodless shorthand of city government. But that's not quite right. The shot that started the latest skirmish in [...]

The professionals said it could not be done. They had never tried it, and they didn't know any public garden that had tried it, and they wouldn't recommend anyone else [...]

A seed should be fecund, no apologies. Yet certain vegetables may advertise their potency a little too insistently. That is, anatomically. O.K., pornographically. Ten years ago, Ken Greene founded the [...]

ST. PAUL -- Two years ago, Elizabeth Millard discovered a way to put fresh produce into car food. No, she's not the one who smuggled shredded lettuce into the Doritos [...]

DECORAH, Iowa -- In the early spring of 1983, Dan Bussey started a file on his computer. The event would prove to be momentous in the annals of American pomology, [...]

A few weeks ago, Bank of America turned me down for a home mortgage. The listing, in Salt Lake City, was a steal at $100,000: a fully furnished, five-story eco-mansion [...]

FALCON HEIGHTS, Minn. -- In the 12 days leading up to Labor Day, more than 1.8 million visitors attended a design expo that has been held annually since 1859. Granted, [...]

If you wanted to find someone picking a fat tomato this week in the City of New York, you could go see Esther and Pam, near the kiddie-pool planters on [...]

The annals of Jewish agriculture in the United States are a little like the story of great Jewish baseball players. After you've name-checked Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg, the conversation [...]

FALLS VILLAGE, Conn. -- Come seek enlightenment in the chicken yard, young Jewish farmer! Come at daybreak -- 6 o'clock sharp -- to tramp through the dew and pray and [...]

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- It is through Allen Bush, the seedsman and raconteur, that I lay claim to the 400-year-old legacy of the Dutch engraver and floriculturist Emanuel Sweert. On a [...]

Des Moines -- A medium-size state capital does not become a competitive global city without a public display of shrubbery. As theories of urban development go, that's a novel one. [...]

A person who won't work for peanuts has no business trying to grow them in New York. The peanut plant cannot be cultivated here, or so the common wisdom goes. [...]

Green is out. Purple is in. Wait a minute. How can green leaves go out of style? Has photosynthesis become dclass? Richard T. Olsen, a tree breeder at the National [...]

The Catalpa Tree Appreciation Society needs fresh blood. There are no meetings to attend and no dues to pay. All you have to do is appreciate the catalpa tree. Maybe [...]

BREVARD, N.C. -- Look up, Mossin' Annie Martin told me, look up on the tin roof of the ''bulimia treatment center.'' Can you see the rust-green clump waiting to be [...]

I recently asked a distinguished garden designer what I should plant in the blank space next to my garage, and he said a wheat field. Interesting choice. But then I've [...]

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- On Christmas Eve, Kevin Johnson received the following gifts: a bed and mattress, a blanket and sheets, a desk and chair, a toilet and sink, towels and [...]

Caleb and Harper cannot share a bedroom forever. For now, Rachel Goldstein cites a number of not-unconvincing reasons to keep her 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter together in the family's [...]

CORRECTION APPENDEDDallas -- If Virginia Savage McAlester were going to die of leukemia, the right time would have been before she ordered a new Texas historical marker for her house. [...]

ARLINGTON, Va. -- Don't look at the garden in the pictures. This is no place Thomas Rainer wants exposed to the world. He would be delighted to flip through a [...]

How will you be celebrating Samhain this year? What's that? You say you won't be observing the high Druid holiday of the ancient Celts? With all due respect, you're probably [...]

Twenty years ago, I made an accidental hajj to a founding site of American Druidism. We called it the Hill of Three Oaks and that's what it was. The main [...]

KINGWOOD TOWNSHIP, N.J. -- The best kind of garden is a useless garden. James Golden's green parcel, in the quiet hummocks above the Delaware River, is literally good for nothing. [...]

Q. Where is the perfect spot to put a plant in the garden? A. Anywhere you can see the ground. You won't find bare earth at the invented prairie garden [...]

CORRECTION APPENDEDSONOMA, Calif. -- Here is a truth about children with autism: they grow up to become adults with autism. Advocates estimate that over the next decade some 500,000 such […]

SAN DIEGO -- On a recent Thursday evening, the United States Navy notified Ryan Benoit that instead of tracking the $150 million overhaul of the Essex, an 844-foot-long air and [...]

MORRISVILLE, Vt. -- On May 17, the price of an act of wonder went up 2.3 percent. The stonemason Thea Alvin had been asking $44 an hour for her extraordinary [...]

At 9 o'clock Friday morning, some 20,000 people will start arriving at a vast field in Custer, Wis., to talk about wind power. No joke. Get this: Thousands of souls [...]

ST. PAUL -- At 2:15 a.m. Sunday, Chris Larson set fire to Chad Bogdan's home. Or something that looked a lot like it. The two-bedroom house was unoccupied at the [...]

I am the Lorax. I speak for the shrubs. The vow lacks gravity, doesn't it? Dr. Seuss's brownish and mossy eco-warrior never made a fuss about the sanctity of a [...]

Locavorism, that culinary buzzword, seems to be everywhere these days. But a restaurant's dedication to regional cuisine can mean more than having a relationship with local farms and purveyors. Here [...]

The Tin Man sent his regrets. On a recent trip to Alabama, I'd hoped to visit the artist Charlie Lucas and his rural art environment at Pink Lily, near Montgomery. [...]

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- For a long time, Joe Minter managed to share a yard with his wife, Hilda, their two sons and 100,000 of their neighbors. His scruffy three-bedroom house [...]

Do you have bad dirt? No dirt? Is the earth in your garden actually a sidewalk? Has a soil-testing lab ever suggested that your gardening outfit should be a hazmat [...]

The feud with my neighbor has festered for a year or two now. He cusses at my children when they sled down the knoll near the property line. He grouses [...]

Winter is a lie. We cry that the earth is draggy, the garden defunct. But as usual we're actually whimpering about ourselves. In his poem ''Snow,'' published in the September [...]

A GOOD way to find out if you should enter a teenager's bedroom is to ask yourself a single, unsparing question: Am I a teenager? If the answer were yes, [...]

CORRECTION APPENDEDPUYALLUP, Wash. A SEVEN-FOOT evergreen will bear 350,000 needles, more or less. And if Gary Chastagner has his way this holiday season, precious few of them will end up [...]

Shopping for a Fir WOULD you pluck an oyster from the bay, park it on platter of ice, and then wait a month to slurp it down? So what makes [...]

SEDRO-WOOLLEY, Wash. GIVE a man a couple of acres and a week in the woods, and he'll start to plan his castle. It is an unusual soul, however, who proceeds [...]

TUCSON THE lost pueblito of Tucson is a Spanish outpost of Pima Indians, soldiers and ranchers on the banks of the Santa Cruz River. On a clear, sunny fall day [...]