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What Season is This, Anyway?
Spring, of course! Take a look. Mid-November, and Spring Has Sprung in the North Okanagan A day before, these new weeds were sitting under three inches of snow. The snow will be back, you can be sure....
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Wild Grain
Today, these notes on a dry country inland from the Northeastern Shore of the Pacific Ocean have me in a working class city on a rainy island in the Atlantic off the coast of Europe, happily among the...
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Soil Atmosphere in Crisis
For thousands of years, farmers have been trying to keep the living earth at bay by stripping all plant life from their fields. Because of evaporation issues around the destruction of organic soil-air...
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Prickly Pear Cactus
And today we stop breathing. Once upon a time, there was a prickly pear cactus. It lived high up on a warm rock outcropping in a cold place, and was as happy as can be. In the spring, well, some...
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The Red Shift
I think it is interesting that the civilization that has determined the expansion rate of the universe through a physical property called the redshift, has been the civilization that has expanded over...
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The Red Shift 2
Palettes of colour can provide lenses with which to enter into the landscape. That was the story last week. To put on those glasses, click here. The earth may be an art installation, but that doesn’t...
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For the Love of Weeds
There is a group of plants that produce food, require little or no irrigation, little care, and are open to be shared by human and animal grazers. They are called weeds. They should be called the...
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Snow? No Problem!
Cheatgrass shows us the way to the future: harvest snow. Cheatgrass at the Edge of Winter There is no need to wait for the rains or to finance high pressure water systems worth hundreds of millions of...
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The Trail to Nowhere
It started as a trail to the promised land. Here at the Whitman Mission in Walla Walla, in Oregon Territory (now in the State of Washington), it has led to a hill of cheatgrass, an invasive weed, and a...
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Saving the Grasslands One Garden at a Time
In forest fire season, even the grassland hills are suffering in the smoke.Note how the golf course road zig-zagging back and forth here manages to take all the water away. Note as well that there are...
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Green Fire
Cheatgrass burns off a whole season’s water at once … in early March. By May, this will be a desert, and this fire will be red. This sagebrush-cheatgrass culture takes the place of a complex world of...
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The Private Landscapes of the Okanagan Valley
Here’s a healthy stand of bunchgrass, which I showed you a couple days ago. As I mentioned, the Okanagan Valley of the North Eastern Pacific Rim probably looked like this 200 years ago. It probably...
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Midsummer Autumn
Celebrate the season! It’s a colour palette for rejoicing. Art without four seasons. Life without four seasons. Life with dozens, often two at the same time, passing through each other like clouds!...
View ArticleGardening is Not Real
In an image-driven culture, gardening is symbolic. It fills the social role of display. Like clothing or a tan or a tattoo. The key is to fill the social role while protecting […]
View ArticleIn the Grasslands, Tiny Effects Aren’t Tiny at All
When I was working on the Spirit in the Grass book with photographer Chris Harris, one of the ecologists on the project told me that the effects of sun and shadow at […]
View ArticleHiding in Plain Sight
Garter snakes know how to do it. Mariposa Lily seeds do it. Water knows how to do it, too. In each case, appearances are deceiving, as an obvious thing is revealed (a […]
View ArticleCheatgrass Control Team at Work
Global Warming? Old news here. Apparently, though, global warming is palatable in the first few days after the snow leaves it. We’re talking about cheat grass, the green haze riding over the […]
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