Maps, satellites and the science of place From the ground, a garden can feel a bit like an island. A fence on every side, a gate, a boundary you mow up to and no further. You tend your patch, and the world beyond the hedge is somebody else's business. But if you see it from above, the way a swift sees it, or a satellite, or an ecologist bent over a screen, the fences dissolve. Your garden is no longer an island at all. It is one green cell in a vast, breathing tissue of garde

Dragonflies were mastering flight three hundred million years before the first bird. They hunt with incredible precision, live most of their lives unseen underwater, and one of them holds the record for the longest migration of any insect on earth. They are also a living verdict on the health of your water, and one of the very few wild wonders you can summon to your own patch by digging a simple pond with shallow margins and a few plants. A dragonfly hangs in the air at the e