Unlike most plants, grass grows from the base

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..so it can be eaten (or cut), and keep growing back. A critical feature for surviving herds of grazing animals and lawnmowers. No wonder it’s so successful.

Published 6 Nov 2013

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Everyone’s a geek about something

The paradise paradox

There is no "away"

An urban area next to a more natural rural area showing how the urban area gets hotter than the surrounding land

Heat islands

Of all my sketches, I have a soft spot for this one. We had some lovely family friends who were massively into birding. As a schoolboy, I was more interested in birds than most, but one day, my Dad and I went to stay with them. They talked us through trips they'd been around the world to spot rare and rectangular birds. They had an amazing telescope trained on the birds at the feeder in their garden. They had wonderful binoculars we used on a bird walk, which showed me birds clearer and closer than I'd ever seen. They knew what birds to look out for and had tape recordings of specific bird calls that brought the birds to nearby bushes. It was impossible to be around them and not start to love birds. As I've gotten older, I've realised pretty much everything and everyone is like that. Premier League football is boring if you don't pay close attention to it, but if you follow every detail, it can be engrossing. I didn't think much of textiles, but after spending an afternoon weaving in Laos, I loved it. Pretty much everything has the thing they're deeply interested in. The physicist Richard Feynman said: "Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough." And here's another similar sentiment from the writer Henry Miller: "The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." It reminds me that just because I don't see something as interesting now doesn't mean that it's not or that people who are into it are somehow weird. Everyone's a geek about something. And that's wonderful.…Of all my sketches, I have a soft spot for this one. We had some lovely family friends who were massively into birding. As a schoolboy, I was more interested in birds than most, but one day, my Dad and I went to stay with them. They talked us through trips they'd been around the world to spot rare and rectangular birds. They had an amazing telescope trained on the birds at the feeder in their garden. They had wonderful binoculars we used on a bird walk, which showed me birds clearer and closer than I'd ever seen. They knew what birds to look out for and had tape recordings of specific bird calls that brought the birds to nearby bushes. It was impossible to be around them and not start to love birds. As I've gotten older, I've realised pretty much everything and everyone is like that. Premier League football is boring if you don't pay close attention to it, but if you follow every detail, it can be engrossing. I didn't think much of textiles, but after spending an afternoon weaving in Laos, I loved it. Pretty much everything has the thing they're deeply interested in. The physicist Richard Feynman said: "Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough." And here's another similar sentiment from the writer Henry Miller: "The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." It reminds me that just because I don't see something as interesting now doesn't mean that it's not or that people who are into it are somehow weird. Everyone's a geek about something. And that's wonderful.

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