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Notes from Turtle Creek
Book by Browning, Ted
139 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1991
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February 21, 2026
For thirty years, I lived in southeastern Pennsylvania, but not in Chester County where author Ted Browning lived. In fact, Browning committed suicide one year before I moved to southeastern Pennsylvania and I had never heard about him, even though our careers were similar in many ways. We were both involved in open space conservation and had a deep and abiding interest in natural history. I had never seen this book when I lived in Pennsylvania; I happened upon it when I visited a used bookstore in Fort Collins, Colorado, and there it was, beckoning from the shelf. It was pricey, but it was in pristine condition, and it promised to bring back good memories of my time on the East Coast, so I opened my wallet.
The book is a collection of 54 newspaper columns that appeared in The Kennett Paper (a newspaper published in nearby Kennett Square, Pennsylvania) from December 1986 through December 1987. In fact, the final column was published posthumously. There are no hints in any of the columns that Browning was experiencing any mental anguish (other than general existential angst over the state of the world); in fact, he glories in the natural world up to the very last. The book was published by The Brandywine Conservancy to honor Browning’s work as a consulting land planner for the Conservancy. William Sellers, director of the Conservancy’s Environmental Management Center, contributes a foreword, and David Thomas, editor of The Kennett Paper, introduces the book.
The columns are short (2-3 pages each). All are focused on the pastoral semi-rural landscape surrounding Browning’s house at Turtle Creek Farm that had been in his family for generations. Chester County then, and continuing today, is rapidly transforming into a wealthy Philadelphia exurb. The landscape was drastically transforming when Browning was writing and that transformation continues to this day. Readers may be familiar with world-famous Longwood Gardens, which is near Browning’s farm.
Many of the essays are very particular to Browning’s environs; these are not the best for readers who are not intimately familiar with the neighborhood. Instead, the most compelling among the columns are those that treat the forests, meadows, and streams more broadly in the context of the agrarian East Coast, but not necessarily the individual fields and woodlots of Chester County. My personal favorite is “Writing a Nature Column,” in which Browning analyzes carefully the process he uses to produce his weekly essay.
Nothing extraordinary or spectacular here, just solid, thoughtful, enjoyable writing about the outdoors. Occasionally Browning is eloquent and lyric. For example, in “The Last Pheasant,” a description of a foxhunt, he writes of a passing fox: “His scent is skunky and wild. It rubs off the thick autumn air as the fox melts into the thickets of lower Turtle Creek…” In “The Quilt,” he writes, “And with the quilt (of newly fallen autumn leaves) in place, the forest snuggles in for winter. Think of the forest floor as a thick labyrinth of nooks, crannies, tunnels where glowing embers of life are tucked away, warmed and enlivened by the leaf quilt of fall.” In “The Fall Turnover Rain,” Browning writes, “Indian summer likes to sneak in after a real good mid-October black frost which freezes hard the leaves of weeds like poke and lamb’s-quarters. The cells burst, the green juices of summer bleed away and meadow autumn colors drain back into the earth.”
The book is a collection of 54 newspaper columns that appeared in The Kennett Paper (a newspaper published in nearby Kennett Square, Pennsylvania) from December 1986 through December 1987. In fact, the final column was published posthumously. There are no hints in any of the columns that Browning was experiencing any mental anguish (other than general existential angst over the state of the world); in fact, he glories in the natural world up to the very last. The book was published by The Brandywine Conservancy to honor Browning’s work as a consulting land planner for the Conservancy. William Sellers, director of the Conservancy’s Environmental Management Center, contributes a foreword, and David Thomas, editor of The Kennett Paper, introduces the book.
The columns are short (2-3 pages each). All are focused on the pastoral semi-rural landscape surrounding Browning’s house at Turtle Creek Farm that had been in his family for generations. Chester County then, and continuing today, is rapidly transforming into a wealthy Philadelphia exurb. The landscape was drastically transforming when Browning was writing and that transformation continues to this day. Readers may be familiar with world-famous Longwood Gardens, which is near Browning’s farm.
Many of the essays are very particular to Browning’s environs; these are not the best for readers who are not intimately familiar with the neighborhood. Instead, the most compelling among the columns are those that treat the forests, meadows, and streams more broadly in the context of the agrarian East Coast, but not necessarily the individual fields and woodlots of Chester County. My personal favorite is “Writing a Nature Column,” in which Browning analyzes carefully the process he uses to produce his weekly essay.
Nothing extraordinary or spectacular here, just solid, thoughtful, enjoyable writing about the outdoors. Occasionally Browning is eloquent and lyric. For example, in “The Last Pheasant,” a description of a foxhunt, he writes of a passing fox: “His scent is skunky and wild. It rubs off the thick autumn air as the fox melts into the thickets of lower Turtle Creek…” In “The Quilt,” he writes, “And with the quilt (of newly fallen autumn leaves) in place, the forest snuggles in for winter. Think of the forest floor as a thick labyrinth of nooks, crannies, tunnels where glowing embers of life are tucked away, warmed and enlivened by the leaf quilt of fall.” In “The Fall Turnover Rain,” Browning writes, “Indian summer likes to sneak in after a real good mid-October black frost which freezes hard the leaves of weeds like poke and lamb’s-quarters. The cells burst, the green juices of summer bleed away and meadow autumn colors drain back into the earth.”
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