Let’s House Hunt for that All-American Utopian Commune. Just in Case.

We do love a good plunge into worlds apart – filled with utopian goat herding, secret society conspiracies and hippies living off-grid on the fringes of society. Of course, the line between commune and cult is famously slippery and plagued with crackpot messiah tendencies. The more modern and optimistic term for the idea of a…

Into the Woods with Green Thumbed Activist, Indy Srinath

Almost a decade ago, Indy Srinath made herself a pretty ambitious promise. “It was like having a sudden awakening,” she tells Messy Nessy Chic about her decision to learn the name of every single plant she discovered, “where you feel like you’ve been living with a crowd of people who serve you your entire life,…

Classrooms without Walls: A Forgotten Age of Open-air Schools

This old black and white photograph pops out at me every now and again on the internet, and it just about sums up my feelings on what my education should have looked like. The photograph was taken in 1957 in the Netherlands where open air schools were quite popular at the time. The idea of an al fresco classroom should…

Famous Authors Are Writing Books for a Time Capsule Library None of Us Will Ever See

In the frosty forest of Nordmarka, Norway, the seeds have been quietly planted to save the future of the written word. Every year for the next 100 years, 100 famous authors have pledged to each write a novel that will remain unpublished until the 22nd Century, when they will be published as part of the…

The Mysterious Magic of Waterfalls

Waterfalls – nothing more, nothing less. This is a brief compendium of gelatin silver and antique postcards found in various archives, dedicated to one of nature’s most beautiful gifts. Maybe one of them can inspire your next adventure, or at the very least, just give your mind a cool break in the heat of summer.…

The Hole: Café Apocalypse?

One of the more challenging “ghost” photos I’ve had the pleasure of researching– and by “ghost” photo, I mean a photograph that floats around the internet, conveniently without any credit or information about the location or subject. The internet rumour was that “the hole” was originally caused by a rooftop bomb attack. As fascinating as that…

Tokyo’s Forgotten Botanical Gardens look like Jurassic Park

This photograph above has been floating around on my To-Find-Out-What-The-Heck-This-Place-is List for a while. It’s one of those semi-viral images that doesn’t have any accurate information attached; not the photographer’s name nor the exact location it was taken (trust me, I reverse-searched this image for the owner until the end of Google– no luck). But…

Vintage Rides and Drive-Thru Trees

“Where’s that tree you can drive through?” According to park rangers, this is the single most frequently asked question in California’s national parks. I asked that very question myself on our road trip in the golden state a few years ago, although we never did up finding a drive-thru tree. Of all the cheesy tourist…

Fireflies of New York

Summer brings a certain magic to the air, but in some parts of the world, it brings the fairytale to life. Once a year, the winged beetle commonly known as a firefly or lightning bugs, put on a show to remember using chemical bioluminescence during twilight to attract sexual mates or prey. In firefly mating rituals, the males…

Invasion of the Vine that Ate the South

No really, that’s its nickname, “the vine that ate the South“; Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida most notably swallowed by the invader so far. Kudzu is known as the most serious and aggressive invasive plant in the United States, spreading in the southern states at a rate of 150,000 acres a year, thirty…