Paul Hetzler

Paul Hetzler is a Horticulture and Natural Resources Educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension, in Canton, NY. He is the author of "Shady Characters," and the website “Where the Wild Words Are."

40 posts

Red Means Stop (Pruning)

Back when I was a baby arborist, I worked for an old-timer who told me that “The best time to prune trees is when the tools are sharp.”

Mint and Maple: Nature’s Memory Medicine

Eating ice cream on a regular basis helps combat Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, according to recent studies. At least that’s how I interpret the results.

Fly Research Yields Possible Trauma Treatment

All about new research on fruit flies - with surprising results - on flies dropping like flies when they see dropped flies . . . (Editor says: There may be help in my summer kitchen!)

White Pines: Colossal in Many Ways

The eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) isn’t really a crop-bearing tree, but it has borne priceless “fruit” for American democracy.

Biotechnology News: Synthetic Milk of Human Kindness Soon to Become a Reality

. . . Perhaps the most controversial product on Cell Signals’ patent is synthetic Milk of Human Kindness.

Sunshine, Coffee and Shoelaces: Keys to Immortality

While telomeres all shrink over time, things like air pollution, chronic stress, obesity, and using alcohol and tobacco are known to hasten the process . . . surprisingly, coffee is good for telomere health as well.

High Reindeer

If not for a fungus, Santa’s flying sleigh would be grounded. If that were the case, the only toys he could distribute would be to the elves who made them in the first place . . .

Beyond Animals

The idea that one could plant a garden of tree-pod birds and vine-lambs, maybe even a cabbage-patch kid, seemed rational to men who fancied themselves the smartest people in the world.

The Giving Tree

. . . Although elms are still present in our forests, Dutch elm disease, which has the appropriate acronym “DED,” now kills them before they can reach maturity.

Secret Language of Mushrooms

It’s old news that fungi transfer information chemically under the ground. This new discovery suggests that as fungi decompose wood, they might also be composing sonnets, love-poems, or grocery lists . . .

Daycare Forests

Research on the health benefits of being in a forest environment is so compelling that urban daycares in Finland “built” forests for kids to use.

The Giant Joro Spider

First your car catches fire, and then your house. Worse yet, your date kills you and devours your flesh without so much as an apology. Yeah, spiders are creepy , , ,

Call the Dogs off the Lions

Why do we hate lions? For reasons beyond any logic that I can see, most Westerners have been brainwashed by the lawn-care industry to believe that dandelions are posies non grata in our landscapes.