Not Too Late for the Poppy Reserve

Just a quick note, a gorgeous pix, and a big thanks to TP member Hugh3of5.

If you're anywhere in the southern CA area and you've never been to Antelope Valley, the time is NOW. Admittedly, I've just read that the poppies have peaked, but there's still plenty to see.

Kent writes: These were all taken just outside the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve in the high desert in the northern edge of Los Angeles County. Make a note for next year, as this shot was taken two weeks ago.

photo credit: Kent Roberts

 

Another no-brainer for you So CAL flower power types...here's a number for your cell phone: (818) 768-3533. It's the Wildflower Hotline sponsored by the Theodore Payne Foundation. Let me know if you get somewhere gorgeous and whether I should knock myself out to go, too. I could make it next wkend if you say it's a must.

2:40 PM ET | 05- 2-2008 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

I Sing the Wildflower Blue

The aqua-tinged, smoky-blue bud tip of native camassia.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

Never mind the body electric, mine doesn't seem to much sizzle and sing anymore, but it's no small compensation to have the time, patience and appetite for hanging out with wildflowers which, this very week along the Columbia Gorge, have burst into audacious blues. We're talking a color wave of genera that includes nothing less than lupine (a dozen different species!), forget-me-not, larkspur (a half dozen!) and pools of multi-hued camassia which I most enjoy in bud.

Doing its very best to impersonate a delphinium, behold the Northwest native Camassia. We gotta million of them. Question: is this simply C. quamash or subsp. breviflora? The pictures/descriptions in my wildflower guide don't quite settle the dispute.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

Camas is the Pacific Northwest for many people, certainly for my neighbor's mother who saw fields of them when she arrived in Oregon (a young woman traveling alone from Arkansas) and decided this was where she belonged. And camas has kept untold thousands of indigenous people alive over the millennia, even the not-so-indigenous as described in this excerpt from the Encyclopedia of Northwest Native Plants for Gardens and Landscapes:

On their trek to the west coast, Lewis and Clark saw vast meadows filled with the blue flowers of camas, noting that they looked like lakes in the distance. The hospitable indigenous people rescued the expedition from starvation offering them, among other foods, baked camas bulbs...Humans cannot easily digest raw camas blubs, so they were always cooked first...No matter how they were prepared, poor Meriwether Lewis found the bulbs indigestible, but they helped keep the Corps of Discovery alive...

...unlike the meadow death camas, Zigadenus venenosus, which is also blooming this week. One of my field guides, Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest notes that much to their later upset, members of the L&C expedition ate this bulb as well.

So, I showed you, now you show me. Natives in the woods, on the roads, by the stream? Post those pix at the Talking Plant Flickr Group and I'll share the best on the blog. If you're not flickr friendly yet, here's how.

1:04 PM ET | 04-15-2008 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Landscape Under Glass Glows

Some breaking news from that blogger's best friend, NPR's Andy Carvin...

Conde Nast has just published its list of the seven wonders of the architectural world, and the Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery is on it.

If you were around in February, you might have taken refuge with me there, DC's most-see glassed-in garden.

12:30 PM ET | 03-26-2008 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

Hummer of a Baby!

Just spotted the baby that hatched a few wks ago outside my living room window. Actually I can't see much but a fast-beating fuzzy lump, and a picture is impossible without pruning the obscuring foliage. So forget that...

Mother hummer has been increasingly absent; I now suspect she's on a shrub or tree nearby keeping watch. She was quite dutiful the other day during a particularly wet downpour; I'm happy to report that today's looking sunny (if chilly), altogether a good day to be a newborn in a snug nest.

Mama Hummer was valiantly unmoved during a horrific downpour the other day. I took this wing-wet pix with my friend Mar's lovely camera but alas, she's taken it back.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

11:56 AM ET | 03-24-2008 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

F-E-C-U-N-D!

I admit the word doesn't have quite the energy of R-E-S-P-E-C-T — a la Aretha — but I could spell it out and shout it out all the same. After a month in D.C. (and I loved every minute of it), I am back in the Pacific Northwest. This place is moist, lush, dense with smells and is excessively, embarrassingly, unrelentingly fecund!

Having spent a good deal of time in Dumbarton Oaks, I was doggone delirious to walk my own Penninsula Park and discover so many of the same fundamental design strengths: exquisite proportions, elegant paving patterns, bold lines (primarily boxwood), and a strong sense of identity.

On top of that, all the beautifully pruned specimens in the sunken rose garden were breaking bud (leaf bud, that is), and the huge formal fountain was throwing off fireworks of water and light.

Yes, and the sky was dark blue (the cusp of evening), the old-fashioned street lamps were aglow, and the air was swooning with the fragrance daphne. Shrubs of the stuff are tucked throughout the park and as with all daphne, I could smell them without knowing where they were.

Plus, not a soul was in the park but me and the beasts. I still have to pinch myself that I live a few blocks away.

HOWEVER ... as I write from the isolation of an office where my only colleagues are canine, I am now keenly aware of the trade-off ...

AND SO ... given that the great joy of living here is the green of this Northwest world, I am recommitting myself to my long-neglected garden (I had back surgery a year ago and just never made it back into swing).

INTRODUCING: The Great Garden Makeover. Photos, interviews, step-by-step instructions, all here in the weeks to come on TALKING PLANTS! I'm collaborating with a few people and my first meeting is tomorrow, so I'll post notes shortly after.

11:22 AM ET | 03- 3-2008 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Talking Forest

So let's talk about the forest.

Forgive my earnesty, but I'm increasingly aware that outside of my loved ones, there's nothing more important to me than the forest. Admittedly, not a particularly striking revelation coming from someone who loves plants. But I wasn't like this till I moved to Oregon, and now wherever I travel, I seek out the region's deepest woods.

The forest works for me because I need the relative silence of the woods to shut me up, shut me down, help me connect to what I think matters (that is, the forest itself). That's why I prefer hiking alone unless I'm with an equally willing silent partner (the dogs do nicely). I need the girth of trunks and the filtered atmosphere to see exactly what's in front of me -- which then makes it possible to tune everything else out.

What wild places keeps you sustained, sane, balanced? And what are you doing to help protect them?

This is a genuine question; no imperious tone here. I'm just curious what organizations you support, how you support them (money counts, most assuredly), plus what recommendations you have for others who want to give back to the plants, trees, forests -- but don't know where to start.

Boy I'm boring when I'm earnest...

7:32 PM ET | 10-29-2007 | permalink | comments (14) | e-mail post

When It's Time to Talk to Plants

You know you've lost it after traveling all day and finally landing at a spectacular B&B, and instead of kicking back and breathing in the view, you spend three hours on the phone with Tech Support trying to get your laptop online.

Yes, I really lost it and alas, not for the first time. It tends to happen when I'm on assignment, running around collecting tape. (Make that "tape"; my hands haven't touched the real stuff in a long, long time).

But I am not a complete idiot. I do have a better self. And she's the one who yanks my head out of my hard drive and says, NATURE, GIRL. GET THEE TO NATURE.

So after I said goodbye to my last interview yesterday, an extraordinary forest historian named Charlie Cogbill who'd waltzed me through 18th century tree archives in Calais, VT, I got dropped off several miles short of the B&B and walked back home in the wonder that is northern Vermont.

Did you know that sugar maples do not turn red? I didn't realize that till I came to Vermont to report on climate change and the future of this beloved tree (headline: it's quite bright, thank you). The fiery red to the left is -- get this! -- a red maple, (Acer rubrum), and the orange/gold/peach concoction to the right is the sugar maple (Acer saccharum).

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

I leave you today with a final word for the hard-working during this unfolding fall:

Get Over Yourself and Get Outside!

11:47 AM ET | 10-10-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post