This past spring I witnessed the superbloom in the California deserts. It was a sensation. The superbloom began in late winter in the southern most deserts and progressed northward, a result of ample rain after five years of drought. I was particularly intrigued, and made two separate visits to the Sonoran Desert east of San[...]
It’s summertime. It’s hot. Time to shed a little bit of clothing. In California, some of our finest native trees and shrubs strip down and shed their bark. It’s called exfoliation, and I swear it seems to happen overnight. I have friends who say they have heard it. I wonder if it’s like the sound[...]
I have wanted to go to the Tallgrass Prairies for many years. My very first successes as a nature photographer were documenting serpentine grasses in the Ring Mountain Nature Conservancy preserve in California. I have done two garden books featuring grasses, one on ornamental Grasses with Nancy Ondra who started Gardening Gone Wild with Fran so[...]
I was not planning a photo session when I went out to prune my Magnolia soulangeana. It seems to have been raining all winter in here in California, and I never found the time to get my winter pruning done. By the time I got around to pruning, the magnolia was just beginning to flower. It[...]
To anyone who has not been in San Francisco in the winter it will be hard to believe these are winter photos, taken in the past couple of years in The San Francisco Botanical Garden during the month of January. I know; it’s a delight. San Francisco is a very mild, summer-dry, winter-wet climate, where it[...]