The Dry Garden: Undressing for summer
Bark hides in plain sight. Who needs the superhero power of invisibility when you’re constantly upstaged by flowers, fruit and foliage? It takes an event to draw the distracted eye to the trunk and limbs of a shrub or tree.
That event is happening now. With the summer solstice nigh, California’s best-adapted woody plants are slipping into dormancy to ride out the dry season. As they do so, still sated on spring rain, newly thickened by another year’s growth, the most wanton of the lot are shedding last year’s bark.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden on the beauty of bark in the Los Angeles Times.…
We are all Gulf residents now
Gulf oil spill transposed to the English Channel. Source: Ifitwasmyhome.com. Click on the map to see how the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico measures up over your local landscape.
British politicians and the British press have woken up offended by the depth of American anger at British Petroleum. There is a failure of imagination here. The fury would be white-hot if the spill were off British shores and an American company were responsible. No, that’s insufficient. There are no words for how the British would react if the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill were gushing into the English Channel every week for nine weeks and counting.
Yet leaving aside the dander of London’s twit of a Tory mayor and his relic friends from the Thatcher era, as the horror at the carnage mounts, and the British have no choice but to get off their …
Water spoken here
This USGS poster of the water cycle was spotted on TajikWater.net. It turns out that the USGS has versions in dozens of languages. Click on the image for the international resource.
Butterflies in Claremont
A new butterfly pavilion opens to the public at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden on June 12. Click here for details. For region-wide listings of classes on butterfly gardens, water-wise irrigation, replacing lawn with natives, looks inside the Arboretum library, hikes and preservation efforts, click here for June and here for July. …
The week that was, 5/30-6/5/2010
June 5, 2010 marked the 34th anniversary of the failure of Teton Dam. Click on the image for background from J. Davis Roger of the Missouri University of Science & Technology
Thirty-four years ago Saturday, eastern Idaho changed forever. The eight-month-old Teton Dam on the Teton River near Rexburg collapsed on June 5, 1976, drowning 11 people and 18,000 head of livestock and causing $2 billion in damage. — “Time to be blunt. The Teton dam won’t be rebuilt, nor should it be,” editorial in the Idaho Times-News, June 3, 2010
“The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.” — Anwar Sadat quoted in “War clouds gather as nations demand a piece of the Nile,” Times of London, June 4, 2010
Ethiopia this month opened the 460MW Tana Beles dam, which would have been considered an act of war in Sadat’s time. …
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