Make yourself at home
Posted on | February 23, 2023 | No Comments
This site is intended mainly as an online clipping service for the reporter Emily Green. Click here to be taken to the journalism archives. Occasional posts below vary between brain-on-fire moments and links to work published elsewhere. Sidebar links to various environmental sites are random acts of enthusiasm.
Highwood Year Thee
Posted on | December 12, 2024 | No Comments
This photo essay charts roughly the third year of work on a new garden at Highwood Drive in north Baltimore. Carried out from October 2023 through October 2024, the work started with the removal of concrete paths and the resetting of permeable ones, then moved on to the excavation of drainage channels around a back yard structure. Emerging native perennials and trees planted previous years combined with a pocketful of annual wildflower seeds ensured that there were some good plants caught at good moments. Painting the garden gates was an autumn impulse. For explanatory notes, plant identifications, and information about sources, scroll down to the bottom of images and click on the titles. Accompanying photo essays may be found here for year one, and year two.
Aguadoc
Posted on | December 9, 2024 | 2 Comments
Like water through rock, the news of Michael Campana’s death traveled slowly from where he died late last August, in his home city of Corvallis, Oregon, to where I now live, in Baltimore, Maryland. Top of the scroll in the December 2nd New Yorker, there was a quip of his that likened an RFK, Jr. scheme to save a river by bottling its water to “a church running a brothel.”
Pure Michael or, to use his water handle, pure “Aquadoc.” Long sober from Twitter, I searched Michael on the newly vibrant platform Bluesky to high five him. Look who’s in The New Yorker! No Aguadoc. Something was wrong. Amplifying good work on social media matters these days. It’s expected that working scientists be out doing “sci comm” on social media explaining their work and promoting their universities. Even before Twitter, Michael was all over it, and not just for himself, but also for his publicity-shy peers. A giant in his field by then, having worked his way up to ever more prestigious posts from the University of Arizona, to the Desert Research Institute in Reno, to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to his last gig at Oregon State, he desperately wanted the world to understand that each person is 60% water and where that water comes from. And so he became the activist publisher of WaterWired, an early and enduring model of how a blog can lift an entire specialist community. Come and get ’em! New papers, meetings, feuds, jobs, he had ’em, every day.
Read moreTags: hydrology > Michael Campana > water blogs > Western water
My friend Wally
Posted on | February 22, 2024 | 3 Comments
Before I moved to Los Angeles in 1998, if you’d said the person closest to me would be a retired Republican cop, I would have suggested a neurological work up. But Walter Matsuura, whose family broke the race barrier against Asian Americans in West Adams in South Los Angeles, and who died late last year, became much more than my next door neighbor. He became my role model for tolerance, grit, and how to hold a drink.
To Maryland, with love
Posted on | October 2, 2023 | No Comments
So
me sites are easy to landscape, others aren’t. The job featured here wasn’t. Judge for yourself whether it was worth it by perusing this photo-essay of the conversion of a conventional garden to a wreath of Maryland’s native rudbeckias, lobelias, viburnums, junipers and asters. Those curious about plant identifications are encouraged to scroll beneath the pictures to the captions. For an all-out guide to gardening in the mid Atlantic, this resource directory, produced last spring for the Baltimore Banner, comes into its own again as fall affords an even more temperate window to establish new plantings.
North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
