The devastating Northern California firestorm that swept through Mendocino, Napa, and Sonoma Counties in October left the earth scorched. Now less than three months later we begin to see the landscape recovering. With a few inches of blessed rain since the fires, the annual grasses have started to green up, creating a eerie juxtaposition to [...]
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. Arctostaphylos manzanita, summertime bark break 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 [...]
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 [...]
Please note: This article was originally published a few months ago at Garden Rant but because it stimulated some vigorous conversations, I thought it worth sharing with our GGW readers. There has been a lot of often rancorous debate about the use of natives vs. non-native plantings in our gardens over the past several years. [...]