“I’ve tried and failed to be a cheerleader for the pure abstraction of wilderness,” Erica Watson writes in “Ghosts of Distant Trees,” her debut essay collection, “but I always find myself drawn back ...

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DALLAS — As helicopters hovered above a Christmas tree farm and dropped bunches of Douglas firs into trucks, Gene Carson peered at a branch cut from a substandard tree.

The second in our series of NBS Shortcuts examines the effects of tree-root systems on building design. Foundation design needs to take account of the water-absorbing capacity of nearby trees, as well ...