The Dark Properties newsletter is usually sent out every few weeks. To receive it in your inbox, be sure to subscribe. Below you’ll find a list of every dispatch, from newest to oldest.
Strange Gardens
On the restorative power of observing light in an unfamiliar place.
A year of sharing flowers ✿
Takeaways from my first full season stewarding a mini mountainside flower zone.
The plight of the monarch
What the vulnerable butterfly can teach us about ourselves, our world, and the magic that goes beyond it all.
Shady tips for a sweltering future
Sam Bloch on shade as an overlooked strategy for keeping cool in a burning-hot world.
Should healthcare be collaborative?
Eushavia Bogan on pivoting from farmer to doctor, plus tips on empowering yourself within the medical industrial complex.
Submerged in the ecotone
What can we learn from bugs about the tense awkwardness of life on Earth?
It’s smart to love weeds
Wisdom from the org teaching colleges to prioritize healthy people, plants, and soil over toxic turf lawns.
Trash people make the best friends ☻
Penny Gibbons on combatting loneliness by starting a neighborhood cleanup group—which escalated into much more.
Can we be more by doing less?
On the impacts of slowing down, a guide for DIY deceleration, and a new interview series.
How can we seed new worlds together?
LinYee Yuan on the beginnings of a collectively designed food forest in central Brooklyn.
Moon Rock Flowers is born ⚘
Our ecologically entangled mini flower farm is really growing… phew.
How to leave tech to become a farmer
Nicole Yeo on starting a collective of Asian-led farms that grow food, solidarity, and mutual viability.
Food and land at the center of everything
Shakara Tyler on “reworking the system against the system” to build cooperative, reparative, Black-led infrastructure in Detroit.
The infinite immensity of seeds
Rowen White on rehydrating ancestral foods as a way to reseed imagination.
Introducing: Recommoning 𓆙
A new series on relational models for food sovereignty, collective land stewardship, and anti-capitalist abundance.
How to plant your first garden 🍅
A step-by-step guide to getting started, plus lots of unsolicited advice and a must-grow plant list for newbies.
I’m seeding a mini flower farm ✿
I'm also launching a gardening club, and taking reader questions. Spring must be in the air!
How do we feel healthy?
Herbalist Rachelle Robinette asks me about my experience working with medicinal plants as an experimental beginner.
Social media is cooked
My life has been heavily shaped by the big, bad apps—but my moment of reckoning has come.
Becoming mossy 𓇢
Historian and Yale professor Elaine Ayers on dismantling colonial institutions from the inside out.
Pushing beyond plastics
Judith Enck on how to eliminate the pervasive pollutant that’s poisoning our bodies and ecosystems.
Alienated into conspiracy
On the darkest day of the year, I want to believe we're not alone in this mess.
In pursuit of regenerative happiness ☘
Post-election thoughts on all the personally fulfilling ways we can transcend doom, depravity, and despair.
An almanac for a tender world
Ana Bessie Ratner on cult-inspired farming, platforming life’s detritus, and her reimagined version of the world’s longest-running publication.
What could an interspecies reality look like?
Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri on designing interspecies spaces, why seed saving matters, and insect infestations as an opportunity for reconsidering our shared ecosystems.
In these woods, we are haunted
I didn’t see the aurora, but I understood that it was there.
Growing beyond the computer ⚘
Cortney Cassidy on leaving her tech job to become a full-time gardener.
Embodying an ecological framework ⊛
Casey Tang on forest gardening, complex systems, and mapping ecological design onto software methodologies.
The wild medicine we forgot to take
Decoding the wild world of healing plants while cultivating a personal approach to herbalism.
A new order of regenerative kinship ⟳
Austin Wade Smith on designing technological infrastructures to steward symbiotic relationships with the more-than-human world.
Sensing the earth
An interview with Agnes Cameron on satellite imagery, and ways of seeing that go beyond the human eye.
From silicon to slime
Claire L. Evans on imagination as a form of computation, and the endless entanglement of our biological reality.
Introducing: Ecologies of Entanglement
A new collaborative series collapsing nature and technology into one future-defining tangle.
What if messiness is freedom?
Our garden is a lush, chaotic mess of most-excellent failures, plus lots of successes.
Aiming for 50,000 daffodils ☑
My dad, Tom Koerner, on the lessons he’s learned over ~six decades of gardening.
Unending metamorphosis ◌
A trip into the forest has my mind crawling with shape-shifting caterpillars and moth-like men.
Prototyping for resilience ⚙️
Benedetta Piantella on creativity as a tool for emergency response, and prepping your go bag.
When your love for plants can’t be contained ❀
Lana Williams on pivoting her career from painter to plantswoman.
The future of food is relational ❂
LinYee Yuan on how to design and build more resilient local food ecologies.
Inside the alien mind of a plant 🌱
Zoë Schlanger on her thrilling dive into the cutting-edge study of plant intelligence.
Q+A: Can we have fireflies in our yard, but no ticks?🍂
The ins and outs of “leaving the leaves,” plus a peek at our new rock pit.
Untangling our knotweed problem ➰
What most needs remediation: Invasive plants, or capitalism?
Sensing towards subversion ∞
Yasaman Sheri invites you to walk and ferment as a way to feel more embodied in the living world.
Q&A: Am I being lazy? 🤷🏼♀️
On entering “experimental mode” and doing easy—plus a playlist for you.
A suburban lawn can be a garden ❁
Designer Elana Schlenker on transforming her Pittsburgh yard into an ecological oasis.
Making hope, healing with fire ◐
Mekdela Maskal on repairing our relationship with the natural world.
Imagining a garden ✿
A nudge to get growing this year, and the beginnings of a new series.
The day I cried over worms 🪱
On infestation, remediation, and “solastalgia” as a personal experience of climate grief.
How to locate yourself within ecosystems of transformation 〰️
Strategist Jungwon Kim brings a holistic, mindful approach to building what comes next.
Rotting as therapy for capitalism ❁
For Cassie Marketos, composting is a way to achieve both environmental and emotional resilience.
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© Willa Köerner, 2025
