30 January 07
Loss Of A Topiarist
If one takes a hard look at the hedges on the far side of a campus parking lot bordering 1st Street here in Davis, one will notice that they have form. One is a dragon, another a whale. There are other topiaries scattered around Davis — a locomotive, an elephant, and others.
Sadly, the landscape artist who created these topiaries, George Sommerdorf Jr., just died Friday in an ice-skating accident up at Donner Lake in the Sierras, breaking through thin ice. Davis will miss his sense of whimsy.
28 January 07
Smew
If birding were always so easy…Today we went to see the smew that’s been hanging out at an exurban park pond near Sonora, about 2 1/2 hours from Davis. The smew is a vagrant species of duck from Eurasia that only shows up in California every few years. This particular bird was sighted a couple weeks ago and has been seen at the pond almost every day since. The one exception was yesterday, when it never showed, which made today’s trek a little more exciting than otherwise. But when we got up there and joined the crowd of several dozen birders, we saw the smew within 20 seconds!
27 January 07
Rumi in the Chaparral
Today was the final session in my Cold Canyon docent training . The final three presentations concerned plant adaptation, Patwin uses of the native plants, and a selection of Farsi poetry. Iraj read us some of the poetry in Farsi.
There is a strong tradition of Persian nature poetry, with Rumi and Omar Khayyam perhaps the best known in the West. I visited Shiraz in the 1970s, home of the poet Hafez. These poets were all revered in their time, though marginal socially and politically.
The great find of the day for me was Sohram Sepehri, a twentieth-century Iranian poet who started out as a painter and who chanced upon an eccentric patron who offered to buy all his paintings if he would travel for some time to Japan and India. His art inspired his poetry and vice-versa.
The poem I read was called Water. The first two stanzas:
Let’s not muddy the water:
somewhere down the stream a pigeon may be drinking,
or in a distant wood, a goldfinch may be washing her feathers.
Or in a village a jar may be filling.
Let us not muddy the water:
Perhaps the current passes by a poplar,
washing sorrow from a lonely heart.
Perhaps a dervish has dipped his dry bread in it.
—
I have some books to look for in the library… oh. And let’s not muddy the water.
26 January 07
Native Plant Links
I sometimes wonder where one might find a particular native plant for Pica’s garden. The California Native Plant Link Exchange figures to be a good resource here — among other things one can query it by species to find out what nurseries stock that plant.
15 January 07
Bodega Trip
While my mother moved to Maine last summer, her house has not yet sold, victim of bad timing. I went over there yesterday to check on things and meet with the realtor.
It was the first time I’d been back since she left.
It was cold but sunny and with almost no wind to speak of, an anomaly in this place where there’s almost always an onshore breeze (more like a gale, usually).
I took myself to lunch at the wonderful Seaweed Cafe (baked queso fresco over roast vegetables and amaranth pudding, washed down with an exquisite Ti Kwan Yin). This is a restaurant that takes “local” food seriously, serving, for instance, wine from not just Sonoma County, but WESTERN Sonoma County.
After I walked along the Head, a place I’d walked so many times with my mother, and stopped at the spot where she strew some of my father’s ashes.
Bittersweet. I’m glad she’s moved to a community she can grow to be a part of while she’s still strong and has all her faculties (and can be near the grandchildren). But she’s far away now. This scattering, fruit of choice and opportunity, comes with a certain price…
14 January 07
From Farm To Pie
On an appropriately pie-shaped plot of land south of San Francisco on the Peninsula coast is an educational farm named Pie Ranch. This farm grows all the ingredients for pies: wheat, berries, bees for honey, goats for milk, chickens for eggs, pumpkins for pumpkin filling. This week they opened up a a café and pie shop in San Francisco named Mission Pie, located at 25th and Mission. Why pie? They say:
We call ourselves Pie Ranch for several reasons: 1) because the ranch is in the shape of a slice of pie; 2) pie, with all its ingredients and associations, is a great means for understanding how food comes from the land to our tables and 3) because the promise of pie will encourage city youth and adults to come discover the beauty and importance of rapidly disappearing farms to the future of people in the Bay Area, our food security, health and our understanding and appreciation of life and nature.
(From World Changing).
11 January 07
Freeze
No, it’s not Minnesota here, but we’re having an unusual Arctic air mass moving in. The minimum temperature for the next several days is expected to drop to the 20s Fahrenheit. Right now it’s 37 outside and dropping, with a north wind picking up. We’re worried about our newly-planted guavas; we’ve covered them with gardening fleece tarps that will hopefully keep them out of trouble.
9 January 07
Gobs More Of Weather Data
I’m not quite sure how to directly make use of the data for Pica’s garden, but at least there’s a good source of such information for us. This is CIMIS, the California Irrigation Management Information System. The state Department of Water Resources maintains a set of over 120 automated weather stations in the agricultural portions of California to provide measurements of evapotranspiration — that is, water loss from soil and plants to the atmosphere — for irrigation planning purposes. Conveniently, there’s a station less than 2 miles from our house. It’s a very solid data record, and it’s neat to see an event like last Friday’s bitter north wind reflected there.
5 January 07
Beetles Among Us
Thankfully the stinky beetles that were invading our house this fall have become scarce (though they have been replaced for now in the household insect pest department by Argentine ants). I never did take one into the Bohart Museum of Entomology for positive identification, but my best guess is that they are Nomius pygmaeus, based on appearance and that this species has been described as a stinky occasional household pest.
Happily, would-be California coleopterists have two new resources to call upon. The first is the website of the California Beetle Project at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. This is an online checklist and database describing the more than 7500 species of beetles in California. The second is that UC Press has just published the Field Guide to Beetles of California. I haven’t seen this book yet but judging by the many others in the California Natural History Guide series it should be very good.
3 January 07
Place Blogging Directory
Lisa Williams of Watertown, Mass. has just launched a directory and aggregation site for place blogging called, appropriately enough, Placeblogger. She has been populating the directory with catalog entries these past several months but ever since the site’s public launch at midnight of this new year visitors have been adding entries at a reasonable clip. I added one for Feathers of Hope this evening.