Queer by Choice

Gardening Difficulties (Theft!)

2009-07-05T19:29:22Z

A few days ago I bought some new native plants and put them in the ground: two bush mallows (Malacothamnus fremontii), a white sage (Salvia apiana), a second foothill beardtongue (Penstemon heterophyllus 'Blue Springs'), a second California fuchsia (Epilobium canum 'Calistoga Hybrids') - and in the front yard, two sacred datura (Datura wrightii). I put the last two in the front yard to keep them away from the dogs, because they're extremely poisonous if eaten. Relatedly, some people use them as hallucinogenic drugs, although this sounds like a particularly stupid choice of drugs to me, since (a) many people who attempt to use it accidentally overdose and die, and (b) most of the people who survive describe their experiences under the influence as having been severely unpleasant. It causes true hallucinations, meaning that the person hallucinating believes the hallucinations are real, unlike with the perceptual distortions caused by LSD. It also causes blindness and fever. And according to the Wikipedia entry about it, some users die not from overdose but rather because the terrifying hallucinations panic them and the inability to see prevents them from seeing where they're going, so they run into traffic and die from being hit by a car.

I also happened to have a related datura plant volunteering in the back yard (the non-native Datura stramonium), so I transplanted it to the front yard near the two native daturas to keep it away from the dogs. I've been watering all the new plants daily so far, because it's been so hot and I want to help them get their roots established as soon as possible so they can survive the heat. One of my new bush mallows has already been producing flowers. Boston dug up my other new bush mallow, so I replanted it and I'm hoping it will recover. My white sage seems to be struggling a bit, but all the other new plants seemed to be doing fine so far.

Except that this morning when I went out to get the newspaper, one of my new native daturas was missing. Completely missing - apparently someone dug it up and filled the hole back in when they were done. There was a 4th of July party on the street in front of our house last night, and in the driveway we share with the other half of our duplex, so I think one of the people at the party must have stolen my datura. And I think they probably stole it for drug purposes, because if they just wanted a pretty garden plant, it wasn't the most logical plant to steal. It wasn't blooming, and I had planted it in a bare spot in our sickly lawn, so that it looked rather as if it might have been a random weed. There are flowering plants in a bed by the front door - a monkeyflower in bloom, a purple alyssum in bloom, and some coral bells with the lingering remains of an old flower stalk. All three of those look prettier than my baby daturas just planted from 4-inch pots. I just can't imagine why anyone would want to steal my datura unless they recognized its drug use potential. And if someone was so familiar with its drug use potential that they recognized the plant on sight when it was tiny and not flowering, shouldn't they also be familiar enough with its drug use potential to know that using it is overwhelmingly likely to be unpleasant and also carries an unusually high risk of death?

This is really very irritating. At least when Boston digs up my plants in the back yard, I can put them back in the ground and hope for the best. When humans dig up my plants in the front yard and take the plants with them, all I can do is sit and wonder whether the person will accidentally kill themself as a result of the theft.

Susan's Birthday

2009-07-03T05:37:57Z

Today is Susan's birthday. She is now an old lady of 43! I gave her some books (by Jung Chang, M. F. K. Fisher, Nega Mezlekia, and Aung San Suu Kyi), a DVD of the complete Fawlty Towers TV series, a sun-tea container, some socks, and a new pair of tennis shoes. She decided to have birthday cake before dinner rather than after dinner, so I pushed 43 candles into the cake I had bought her and attempted to light them all. Susan helped me light them, but some of them still burned almost down to cake level by the time we finished lighting them.

We went out to an Indian restaurant for dinner, because Susan had been craving spicy-hot chicken vindaloo. I have zero tolerance for any degree whatsoever of spicy-hotness, so I generally avoid Indian restaurants, but Susan said she would be able to recommend foods there that I could eat. The restaurant was a tiny little place in which the woman serving us seemed to also be the chef. We had four shared appetizers - papadom, veggie samosas, aloo paratha, and garlic naan. The papadom came first, with two different sauces to put on it. Susan tried them both and told me the red sauce was sweet and the green sauce was minty. I tried them both and concluded that the red sauce was spicy-hot and yucky and the green sauce was spicy-hot and yucky with vegetable-flavored yuckiness mixed in. I declined to eat any more, so Susan ate mine. Then the veggie samosas arrived. Susan said they were good and that I could pick out the peas (because I hate to eat anything green). I said they were spicy-hot and inedible, so Susan ate mine. When the aloo paratha arrived, I found it to be spicy-hot and inedible also, but the garlic naan was all right. So I ate garlic naan and drank mango lassi. The mango lassi was absolutely delicious, so much so that I thought I would look for it at the local Indian grocery stores in the future - except that it turns out to contain yogurt rather than a rice drink as Susan had claimed, and it did somewhat bother my lactose intolerance, so I guess I shouldn't look for it after all. Susan tried my mango lassi and hated it, because she hates mango flavoring.

My chicken biriyani contained an awful lot of vegetables for me to pick out, but I was relieved to find that it was not spicy-hot; it was flavored only with tomato sauce. It was edible, though not delicious. Susan's chicken vindaloo, however, was apparently not spicy-hot at all either. She even gave me a bit of the potato from it, and I confirmed that it was in fact not spicy-hot at all. She was disappointed by this, and attempted to express her disappointment to the server/chef by saying that it didn't have the spicy kick she had been expecting. The server/chef misinterpreted this as a compliment and exclaimed that she had tasted it and made sure it wasn't spicy - she was apparently convinced that because Susan is white, Susan couldn't possibly actually want her food flavored the way she had ordered it. Susan was too cowed after this response to try again to request spiciness. I was extremely amused by this, not least because the restaurant's racial stereotyping would have been entirely accurate if they had only applied it to me - in fact, they apparently didn't racially stereotype me enough, since so many of the appetizers were too spicy-hot for me to be able to eat them. We agreed that it is practically impossible for anyone to be any more white than I am, at least food-wise. Well, and skin color-wise, too. Poor Susan, stereotyped as having the same food preferences as me, just because her ancestors are from the same continent as mine.

Now Susan is feeling a bit ill from eating too much, no doubt because she had to eat my share of all but one of our appetizers. I probably should not be so amused by the fact that her birthday dinner went awry.

And now, on a completely unrelated note: Look at Stardust and Ganymede sleeping next to each other! We have such adorable pets.

Snake Lake

2009-07-01T18:03:35Z

This past weekend, Susan and I went camping at Snake Lake in Plumas County. We chose it partly because it's at an elevation of 4,200 feet, which we were hoping would be high enough to be above the heat of the Sacramento Valley. It was 111 degrees Fahrenheit (44 degrees Celsius) at our home when we returned on Sunday afternoon. However, it was 96 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) at the campground on Saturday afternoon while we were there, which is not really cool enough to be comfortable either. So I think that as an attempt to escape the heat, the trip was a failure; we would have been better off staying home where we have air conditioning.

Another reason we chose Snake Lake was because it's near Butterfly Valley Botanical Area, which I wanted to visit while we were there. This was kind of a flop too, in that we never succeeded in visiting Butterfly Valley Botanical Area. We did drive from our campsite at Snake Lake to nearby Smith Lake, and the southern end of Butterfly Valley Botanical Area extends to approximately the northern shore of Smith Lake. But we ended up on the southwestern shore of Smith Lake rather than the northern shore, and there were no interesting plants there, and it was much too hot for either of us to feel like walking all the way around to the northern shore just on the off-chance that the plants might be more interesting there. However, back at out own campsite on Snake Lake, I did find a huge number of plants that I'd never seen before, so I think the unusual botanical diversity that Butterfly Valley Botanical Area was established to protect was somewhat evident even beyond the boundaries of the official Botanical Area.

But let's start with the drive there. We took the Feather River Scenic Byway, so we were driving next to the Feather River North Fork for most of the way. We stopped once to get sodas from the ice chest for each of us and admire the river. Here is Susan with Boston.

On the opposite side of the road from the river was a huge cliff of solid rock.

Our campsite was directly on the lake, which wasn't entirely a good thing. We were utterly terrorized by mosquitoes, so much so that even though it was 96 degrees, we took to wearing long pants and often even long sleeves just to minimize the amount of skin exposed to mosquitoes. Susan suffered mild heatstroke as a result. Both my hands had more mosquito bites on them than fingers. Luckily, we had come prepared with vast amounts of Benadryl cream to stop our allergic reactions to the mosquito saliva and make the bites shrink to tiny red dots. This made the onslaught bearable, though still annoying.

Because of the heat, we left the privacy flap off the roof of our tent most of the time, so that everything above the black strip at the bottom of the tent was just mosquito netting. You'd think mosquito netting would be good for keeping out the mosquitoes, but it was amazing how many bugs of all kinds managed to fly into the tent anytime the door was opened even slightly. The first night we arrived, we had several large bumblebees and yellowjackets crawling around on the roof of the tent, and at one point we must have had at least 30 mosquitoes in the tent at once . . . they kept landing on the inside of the netting in groups of six or seven within a few inches of each other, and I kept trying to kill entire groups with a single swat, and ending up just scaring them all off to new perches where they were harder to squash.

Boston became utterly obsessed with the beavers in the lake. When we called her over and over, she never even glanced at us - she had eyes only for the beavers. Trying to catch them, she swam all the way out into the middle of the lake. The beavers slapped their tails on the water to splash at her, and she lunged for them, but they dove underwater and she had no idea where they'd gone. After a while, she found a shallow spot to perch on in the middle of the lake, just sitting there, with only her head above the water. She spent virtually the entire night in the lake, the first night we were there - she came onto land only twice, for about 15 minutes each time. We wanted to keep her in the tent, but Boston is a remarkably dextrous dog who has absolutely no difficulty opening tent zippers anytime she feels like it. Each time she came in to visit us, she shook a few gallons of dirty lake water off herself and all over the tent, then promptly let herself right back out of the tent again and resumed her beaver-hunting vigil in the lake. (I tried to take pictures of the beavers, but they only came out after it was too dark for the pictures to turn out well.)

Ganymede, however, took no interest whatsoever in the beavers. He's afraid of water. He did wade all the way into the lake once when we first arrived, but this served only to convince him that he never wanted to wade any deeper than his ankles ever again. We decided that his complete disinterest in beavers confirmed that we chose the right name for him.

The lake also harbored an entire orchestra of frogs, which Boston unsuccessfully chased in the daytime when no beavers were available, and a flock of Canadian geese, which Boston showed no interest in.

I, of course, was busy hunting for plants. In our campsite I found lanceleaf selfheal (Prunella vulgaris)).

The next place I explored was the path to the outhouse. The dogs followed.

I found whitevein wintergreen (Pyrola picta).

And little prince's pine (Chimaphila menziesii).

We collected some firewood from near the outhouse, and then explored the rest of the campground. Small meadows along the lake produced clouds of white flowers.

I don't know what they were, but they were obviously in the aster family.

The bushes directly bordering the lake were mostly rose spiraea (Spiraea douglasii).

A low cement bridge separated the main part of the lake (where the campground is) from this shallower, narrower portion that has no trails around it. I never explored this part of the lake, but here's what I saw of it from the bridge.

Pacific mountain dogwood (Cornus nuttallii) was blooming on the other side of the bridge.

There was a single campsite on the other side of the bridge, beautifully isolated from the others. Unfortunately, people had recently trashed it. In addition to the huge pile of litter you can see here, the picnic table was covered with paint and other gunk from a paintball fight. If you do this to the campsites you camp in, you have no business camping!

There was a trailhead sign next to the trashed campsite, so I took the dogs a short distance up the trail, which led uphill, away from the lake. The plants on the trail weren't very interesting, though. It was mostly just trees and a thick layer of pine needles on the ground. I went back to the trashed campsite and took a different trail, which continued around the edge of the lake. This trail led me through all manner of botanical wonders! It started out with fairly ordinary plants, such as blooming thimbleberries (Rubus parviflorus).

And sulphur peas (Lathyrus sulpureus).

And largeleaf avens (Geum macrophyllum).

But very soon, I began seeing more interesting plants. Like dwarf wood rose (Rosa gymnocarpa).

And columbines, which Ganymede had a great time cavorting among.

The path narrowed, and the plant life began to look rather like a rainforest. I found myself surrounded by Shasta leopard lilies (Lilium pardalinum).

I also found Sierra bog orchids (Platanthera leucostachys).

And California corn lilies (Veratrum californicum).

The dogs waded near the Shasta leopard lilies.

The leaves that covered much of the lake were native watershield (Brasenia schreberi).

We saw a large beaver lodge near the shore.

The path ended near some Indian paintbrush, but the dogs and I forged ahead a bit farther, through the thin spots in the underbrush. (I initially explored this area without Susan, because she was suffering mild heatstroke on Saturday. She later accompanied me on the path (on Sunday), but she stopped when the path ended.

The dogs found a meadow to cavort in.

And I found naked mariposa lilies (Calochortus nudus) in it.

Boston waded in every little inlet.

And Ganymede occasionally, very tentatively, joined her. But only at the shallow edges.

Various tiny streams flowed into the lake. Wherever there was a trickle of water flowing, the ground was covered with wild ginger (Asarum lemmonii).

We came to a humongous fallen tree that blocked our way. It was far too tall to climb over - taller than I am - so we walked to the base of it and tried to go around. (The fallen tree is on the right. The smaller mass of roots on the left is just a piece that broke off when it fell.) But the foliage on the other side of the tree turned out to be so thick that we gave up and returned to our campsite.

Susan was feeling well enough when we returned that she drove us to nearby Smith Lake, where we failed to find Butterfly Valley Botanical Area and also failed to find any particularly interesting plants. It was a short trip. The weather was stiflingly hot. Susan did pick up some firewood while we were there, though. We had no need of campfires for warmth at night, but she needed a fire to cook dinner - barbecued chicken and corn on the cob.

When we returned, Susan rested in our campsite while I took the dogs on a short walk along the main road just outside the campground. Both of us, in our separate locations, were frightened when we heard rifle fire nearby - someone was hunting in the campground illegally. The rifle shots were closer to me than to Susan, and even closer to where Susan mistakenly thought I was walking. Both of us were picturing the dogs and I getting shot. I returned to the campsite fairly quickly, after photographing just two plants. The first one is Western joepiweed (Ageratina occidentalis), a relative of the common garden plant grown in the eastern United States. The Western one isn't commonly grown, because it isn't adapted to low elevations, but it was much better looking than it appears in the photograph, where the pink flower clusters blend into the pine straw below and virtually disappear.

The second one is some sort of blue beardtongue, but much less showy than the one in our yard at home.

After returning to our campsite to reassure Susan that we hadn't been shot, the dogs and I explored the other end of the campground (the opposite direction around the lake than the path we'd previously taken). The campsite next to ours had a little patch of perennial sweet pea (Lathyrus latifolius), which I was disappointed to realize is not native.

I picked this stalk of it for Susan, who kept it in a mug of water on our picnic table.

The sweet pea was growing with red clover (Trifolium pratense), which is also not native; these were almost the only non-native plants I saw there, and I saw them only in that one campsite. I continued on the dirt road through the campground, which passed under the arch of this tree. The indistinct cloud of green on the ground under the tree is horsetails.

Further on, I found waxy checker mallow (Sidalcea glaucescens). Near here, I also saw another species of native orchid - northern coralroot (Corallorhiza trifida), but the orchid looked brown and sickly and I didn't get a good photo of it. I did get this photo of the checker mallow.

The dirt road ended when it met a perpendicular paved road. I turned right on the paved road to continue around the edge of the lake. This lupine was just around the corner, and I was so eager to photograph it that I failed to notice that I was kneeling in a huge swarm of ants to do so. When I stood up again, the ants were all over my jeans. Huge ants, not normal ants.

I brushed them off and continued. I found a single campsite on the paved road, isolated about a mile from all the others, with its own private single-stall outhouse, and wished we had seen earlier so we could have claimed it as our own. It also had a wider view of the lake than ours did, because it was in a sort of meadow, with fewer shrubs blocking the view than our campsite had.

There were many meadows on this side of the lake. I was most excited to find camas (Camassia quamash), which the native Maidu people cultivated for food. They ate the bulbs that it grows from. The camas are the blue spikes in the meadow. They'd be easier to see if the flowers were open, but they were mostly closed up.

I did find one open camas flower in one of the meadows, though.

Some of the meadows were full of white rushlilies (Hastingsia alba) - the white spikes of tiny flowers visible here.

I saw lots of Sierra morning glories (Calystegia malacophylla), though only a few were blooming.

And I recognized the peach-colored flowers of annual mountain collomia (Collomia grandiflora) from the photographs I'd seen of it growing in Chuck B.'s San Francisco garden.

I reached the end of the path and returned to our campsite, and the next morning we went home. But not before Boston made it clear that she wants to go camping at Snake Lake as often as possible, so that she can continue her beaver hunting.

On the road out of the campground, I asked Susan to stop the truck so I could photograph these blue cluster-lilies.

At my request, we took a different road back home than we had taken to the campground. Along the way, we passed through a huge field of nothing but mountain mule ears (Wyethia mollis) near the tiny town of La Porte.

Michael Jackson

2009-06-26T19:26:27Z

It's kind of bizarre to see how much fuss is being made over the death of a singer whose career, though huge in its time, had been practically nonexistent for more than a decade - not due to any loss of interest on his part in continuing to make music, but rather to a very vocal loss of interest on the part of his audience. However, I think the news coverage is mistaken in implying that his major contribution to the culture was his music. Certainly he was one of the few most successful singers of all time, for a while, but he does have some competition for that spot. There's another, very different cultural contribution for which he was absolutely unrivalled, and therefore even more important than he was musically: he was the ultimate pop cultural pariah.

I think that our culture, like most cultures, feels a real need for pariahs: people that absolutely anyone who wants to can feel securely superior to. Pariahs are often people who break gender roles, such as the hijras in India, and Michael Jackson did that. But our culture has many other hierarchies in addition to gender that are taboo to mess with, and Michael Jackson managed to get himself on the widely disapproved of side of all of them. He went not only from male to almost female (probably the single most taboo path to follow in breaking gender norms) but also from black to basically white (again, the single most taboo path to follow), and from being adored for his successful career and incredible wealth to being a symbol of the ultimate in ridiculous misplaced vanity made possible by money: he had so many plastic surgeries to try to achieve some elusive standard of beauty that he very visibly destroyed his nose cartilage and ended up almost universally regarded as one of the ugliest people on the planet. At that point, just about the only thing left that he could have done to make himself more reviled was to get accused of child molest - which, of course, he promptly did.

I'm not suggesting that he planned any of this. He certainly doesn't seem to have enjoyed the resulting alienation of much of his fan base. But for whatever reasons, he did end up as the ultimate pop cultural pariah, and it does seem to me that his contributions to the culture in that way are even more completely unrivalled than his contributions as a musician. So I find it a little awkward that the news anchors seem to be trying to avoid talking about that, apparently for lack of being able to figure out how to do so without being gratuitously cruel to the dead.

But then, perhaps my view is skewed by the fact that I never heard of Michael Jackson until 1987, when I saw him in Captain Eo at Disneyland and was thoroughly repulsed. By that point he had already undergone a lot of his plastic surgeries and skin bleachings. I was eleven years old and had never even listened to the radio. Costumes and dance styles I was unfamiliar with frightened me, and the fact that my parents expressed similar repulsion and explained that his appearance had been drastically altered by plastic surgery and skin bleaching certainly didn't help matters. So I never experienced the Michael Jackson who, for some period of time, was perceived as just a great singer and not a pariah. I never bought his music or took much notice of it. So the only Michael Jackson I ever really knew about is the one who's almost impossible for the news anchors to express grief over, because talking about him is almost inseparable from mocking him. But I do feel that this aspect of him has at least as much to do with the world's seeming fascination with his death as his (largely destroyed) musical career does. For better or for worse, and whether or not they're willing to admit it, people feel a certain need for pariahs, and it's hard to imagine anyone ever again fulfilling that function as well as he did.

June Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

2009-06-14T23:25:02Z

Although it's only June, my garden is starting to visibly decline from the peak of its May glory. We had a huge lightning storm on June 4 - lightning experts were quoted in the newspaper saying that it was the most prolonged and intense lightning storm they'd ever seen anywhere in the world, and the map in the newspaper showed that our town was right in the center where the storm was most intense of all - and a lot of the flowers were knocked down by that. My poppies are looking increasingly dog-trampled, the smaller of my two silver bush lupines shriveled up and turned brown while we were camping at Little North Fork (I think this was from drought - it looks dead but it actually isn't, so I've been watering it now in hopes it will recover), Boston dug up my evergreen currant and my blue elderberry (the former looks like it may recover, but the latter looks like it won't), and either Boston or Ganymede or both leaped into my volunteer willowherb and broke off 90% of the branches at ground level. Also, bermudagrass is taking over the entire yard with a ferocity that I don't remember it demonstrating last summer. But then, last summer I only had two plants, so I was more free to douse the yard with herbicide to kill everything in sight.

Anyway, you won't be able to tell from most of these photographs that my garden is in decline, because I took most of these photographs at the end of May, before the decline began. For example, when I took this photograph, Boston was still the only dog in the family. She posed with catmint and deergrass (both in the foreground), beardtongue, poppies, and silver bush lupine (all in the background to the right of her).

My narrowleaf milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis) has been blooming and attracting plenty of milkweed bugs. (We had millions of milkweed bugs even before I planted any milkweed; if anything, we actually have fewer of them now. I don't know what they were all eating before I planted milkweed, but I do see them crawling on the milkweed flowers sometimes.) This is an awkward-looking plant; on any given day, usually about half the stems are lying horizontally on the ground. Strangely, these stems intermittently perk up and stand vertically again, only to lie horizontally again the following day. I have no idea what that's about. The flowers are barely noticeable unless you walk very close, but they're kind of pretty if you do take the time to look for them.

My superb mariposa lily (Calochortus superbus) bloomed at the end of May. It produced three flowers, one at a time in rapid succession, each one lasting less than a week. Now they're all gone, and alll that's left is three seedpods. They were interesting while they lasted. They're called mariposa lilies because the markings on the petals resemble the eyes on the wings of a butterfly. "Mariposa" is the Spanish word for "butterfly."

Also at the end of May, I began finding old, dried up remains of flowers on my soap lily (Chlorogalum pomeridianum). This confused me terribly, because I never saw any fresh flowers. I checked the plant every day, and every day I saw only buds and old, dried-up flower remains. Then Susan bought me the book Wild Lilies, Irises, and Grasses: Gardening with California Monocots. The book explained that this plant blooms only at dusk, whereas I had been looking at it in broad daylight. I decided to go check on it at dusk, and right away I found it blooming.

My blue flax (Linum lewisii) is still blooming away as much as ever. This plant has definitely impressed me. (And I'm happy to say that one that sprouted from seed I scattered last fall is now almost big enough to start flowering too - next year I may have many of these!)

My smaller silver bush lupine (Lupinus albifrons) produced a single flower spike at the beginning of May, then wilted and turned brown at the end of May. My larger silver bush lupine waited until the end of May to suddenly produce a dozen flower spikes. This plant is still looking healthy; hopefully it had time to get its roots out a lot farther than my younger, smaller one did. However, the flower spikes are short lived; the bottom halves of them have already turned into seedpods now. (On the bright side, this means I'll soon be growing more of them!)

My catmint (Nepeta X faassenii 'Walker's Low') is in full bloom now and growing fast. Stardust is afraid to venture far enough out in the yard to go smell it, but she likes it plenty when I bring a sprig or two of it inside for her.

My foothill beardtongue (Penstemon heterophyllus 'Blue Springs') has just about reached the end of its blooming season now. Boston and Ganymede trampled on it and broke off most of the last few flowering stems the morning after we adopted Ganymede. But I took this picture in late May, while it was still at its peak.

My hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) started blooming at the end of May and hasn't stopped yet.

My tiny Caraway thyme (Thymus herba-barona) that I planted in April hadn't yet bloomed a month ago, but has finished blooming now. Here's what it looked like while the flowers lasted.

My red bush monkeyflower (Mimulus puniceus) in the front yard has been blooming since late April, and now the smaller one in the back yard is also blooming. However, I couldn't get a good picture of either of them this month. They both have a lot of dried up old flowers on them, along with a few pretty new flowers at the tips of the stems.

A shrub that was apparently planted by the owners of our duplex has also started blooming. I think it's variegated Japanese burning bush (Euonymus japonicus 'Aureo-marginata').

It's supposed to be planted in full sun, but the owners planted it under the shade of the patio roof. As a result, the branches that are able to reach into the sunshine are twice as tall as the others and have yellow leaf variegation, while the parts in the shade are stunted and have no yellow on the leaves. This is the sort of monstrosity you will produce if you plant things without researching the correct conditions for them.

Here are two more shots of Boston in the garden at the end of May.

Here is Boston in the garden this morning, demonstrating why my poppies are looking so trampled lately.

And here is Ganymede running out to help her trample them. (Recognize my foothill beardtongue? See, it only has three or four blue flowers left.)

The dead-looking plant to the left of Ganymede is one of the dog-trampled willowherb branches that I tried to replant, hoping it would grow new roots. Obviously, it didn't work.

Lastly, here's a preview of next month's Garden Blogger's Bloom Day. My Fort Miller fairyfan (Clarkia williamsonii) is now as tall as I am, but it still hasn't bloomed. It's too heavy to hold up its own weight anymore, so I shoved it into the space between the fence and the house to keep it upright. One of these days, it's supposed to bloom.

Ganymede

2009-06-10T06:54:56Z

Susan and I got a new dog today. She saw an ad in the newspaper for a one-year-old male Labrador/Pitbull/Pyrenees mix, and read it aloud to me along with some other ads, and asked me whether she should call about any of them. She seemed to be leaning toward that one. I told her that I thought a one-year-old dog would be a good age for us - old enough not to completely bounce off the walls all day, but young enough to be in good health for many years in the future. I said she should go ahead and call if she wanted to call, so she called about that ad. The dog described in the ad was already gone, but the people had another dog they needed to get rid of too, that they hadn't described in the ad. This other dog was also a one-year-old male, supposedly a mix of German Shepherd, Heeler, Labrador, and Malamute.

We drove to a trailer park to meet the dog. We brought Boston with us to see how they would interact. Boston tends to be afraid of everyone and everything, so we were worried that a new dog might dominate her too much. It was pretty clear that Susan was likely to be crazy about almost any dog at all, but I'm not much of a dog person, so I was worried that I would probably hate it. The people had said on the phone that the dog looked like a miniature Rottweiler. I ran a Google image search on Rottweilers and concluded that the dog was likely to be hideous.

When we arrived in the trailer park, the dog turned out to be the sweetest, gentlest dog ever, and rather cute too! His behavior impressed me immediately - he behaved much better than Boston did. Boston was actually behaving rather better than she sometimes does, but she still barked a little and at one point even escaped from Susan and ran off to chase the people's cat, dragging her leash behind her. The other dog stayed right with us and never barked at all. The man there explained that the dog had belonged to his sister, who apparently has a habit of adopting dogs but neglecting them terribly so that she can never keep one for as long as six months. He took the dog away from his sister, but he couldn't keep it himself.

Anyway, we were both very impressed by him, and we both decided right away that he was the right dog for us. So we brought him home, and Susan has named him Ganymede, after the mortal male lover of Zeus. Ganymede needs to be neutered and given his adult shots, so we will be taking care of that later this week. He's a 40-pound dog (about the same size as Boston but about 10 pounds skinnier than her) and looks very much like a Heeler/German Shepherd mix, although we can't see any trace of his supposed Labrador/Malamute heritage. He didn't know any commands whatsoever, although we've been working on teaching him "Sit" this evening. But he is an extremely easy-going dog, and so submissive that it appears that Boston may actually be the top dog in the house for a change.

As long as I'm posting photos of pets today, I'll include one each of Boston and Stardust too. I didn't take the ones of Boston or Stardust today - they're from other days within the past couple of weeks. Here is Boston, rolling around on the dining room floor. (She had horrendous redeye in this photo; I attempted to draw her eyes back in, but I didn't entirely fix the red ring around her left eye.) She is a cute dog, but she's been getting into plenty of trouble this week. Yesterday she dug up my blue elderberry, and the day before that she dug up my evergreen currant. I replanted both of them as soon as I noticed, and the evergreen currant (which was lying uprooted in the shade and had not fully wilted when I found it) actually looks like it may recover fully. The blue elderberry (which was lying uprooted in full sun and had completely wilted before I found it), however, does not look so good at all.

And here is my beautiful neurotic three-year-old kitty, Stardust. She is not on good terms with us today. Ganymede has made growly noises at her a couple of times, but hasn't otherwise harassed her in any way. Still, she's not very happy about our bringing home a dog. And then I made her day even worse by dragging her out from under the bed to administer her monthly dose of flea medicine.

She's not all that friendly a cat to begin with - most of her friendliness in the past consisted of her willingness to sleep next to me at night, rather than a willingness to spend much time with me in the daytime, and ever since we moved in here, she won't sleep next to me at night anymore, because our double bed doesn't have enough extra space in it for her liking. (Boston, and formerly Taco, and now Ganymede, sleep on the foot of the bed.) She has lately been spending most of her time sitting on top of the dining-room table - just like in this picture, although more often she's lying down on it or being a kitty loaf on it. Until this evening, when she spent several hours hiding under the bed because of Ganymede. But now she's out on the table again.

Project Pushback: Same-Sex Marriage Commercials

2009-06-05T16:58:30Z

Projecct Pushback is asking people to vote on which of about 70 different commercials should be used in future same-sex marriage campaigns. You can vote for as many as you like, but you can only cast one vote for each. I voted for My Two Moms, I Am #1, Evolution, Family Values, Remembering Chuck and Carl, Marriage by Committee, and License.

There were three others that I feel were good enough to deserve mention, although I decided not to vote for them. A Friend's Take has an interesting narrative approach (showing a heterosexual Christian talking about coming to terms with his gay brother) and a really adorable gay male couple, but I decided not to vote for it for two reasons. One is that the very last line unfortunately leaves the impression that supporting same-sex marriage basically comes down to disregarding the Bible after all, instead of changing people's minds about what the Bible actually asks them to do - I'm quite certain that the Bible doesn't say you have to vote against allowing secular governments to recognize the marriages of other people who don't necessarily even belong to your religion. The other reason is that - extremely unfortunately - I don't think the homophobes we need to reach through commercials like this are ready to handle as much physical affection between two males as this video shows. They are a wonderful couple and I wish the homophobes could recognize and admire that, but I think that instead, the homophobes would just be incensed that two cute gay boys are being allowed to have more fun than them. (I feel badly about this second reason - can you tell? This helped persuade me to vote for "Family Values" and "Remembering Chuck and Carl," because I felt I ought to vote for at least something with gay men in it. If they're sufficiently old and wrinkled and/or fathers, do they eventually become less threatening to homophobes?)

Reaching Towards Liberty has some good aspects, but it strikes a false note with the fact that its only reference to racial discrimination is to interracial marriage. It refers to gender discrimination in terms of women not having been allowed to vote, but gives the bizarre impression that the only discrimination that black people ever had to fight against was laws that prevented them from marrying white people. I think this commercial as currently written will just offend people and turn them against us. However, it could be fairly easily edited to include a much better quick summary of racial discrimination than that one, which I think would turn this into a pretty good commercial.

A Wish has some good aspects too, but the narrator's tearful voice gets a bit over the top, and I distrust the antiquated terminology referring to a "homosexual man" instead of a "gay man."

Oh, and please don't vote for the stupid Marriage Equality video that does nothing but scream "We're born that way! It's not a choice! We can't help it!" - well, and it also misspells "lesbian," if that can be considered to count as doing something. Let's start actually applying Rule #2 of The Dallas Principles, shall we? Queer by choice people are part of the queer community and should not be shoved into a closet and left behind.

Camping at Little North Fork

2009-05-29T16:05:25Z

Susan and I spent our three-day Memorial Day weekend at Little North Fork Campground. The campsites are directly on the bank of the Feather River North Fork, which is what gives the campground its name. Here is our tent by the river.

We spent a lot of our time reading. Here, Susan is reading my copy of Gertrude & Alice by Diana Souhami (about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas). I was reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, which featured definitely the most grotesque descriptions I've ever read of massacre victims' dead bodies being mutilated (specifically, white men cutting out the genitalia of dead Cheyenne and Arapaho women at the Sand Creek Massacre and wearing them on their hats). After we both finished those books, Susan started reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and I started reading the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, which was horrendously sexist and completely destroyed my respect for Gabriel García Márquez - but I should probably write a whole separate LiveJournal entry about that. (Oh, and Susan says she also read four other books while we were there: three mystery novels and Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth by Victor Brombert.)

Boston spent her time playing with rocks and barking at anyone who walked by our campsite. One of the people in the campsite next to ours caught on to her love of rocks and started tossing rocks for her every time he walked by, to distract her from barking at him.

Facing upstream from our campsite, we had this view of the river. There was a bridge at the far end of the campground.

Facing downstream, we had this view. The river was a gorgeous shade of green that the camera never quite did justice to.

Boston couldn't get enough of the river.

That's a rock she's holding in her mouth.

Here she is posing with Indian rhubarb (Darmera peltata) - those furry brown succulent stems protruding from the water, with clusters of pink flowers on top. There are four of them behind her in this next picture.

And there's one of them in front of her in this one.

And here's a closeup of the plant itself. Susan picked one flower cluster for me; you can see the stub of its stem to the right of the remaining flower cluster. All the flowers closed their petals immediately when she picked it.

Our campsite was constantly filled with swarms of butterflies. Two kinds - these orange ones (California tortoiseshell) and some smaller lavender ones (possibly Anna blue?) that my camera had a harder time capturing. (It was also filled with swarms of mosquitoes and yellowjackets, but I was too busy trying to escape those to want to take pictures of them.)

The lavender butterflies were smaller than the California tortoiseshells. Susan said she used to have a photograph of Taco jumping up in the air after a swarm of these same type of lavender butterflies, but she lost her only copy of the photograph when a neighbor stole her old laptop a year and a half ago.

There was a plaque mounted on a boulder in the campground. It said: OUR HEARTS WILL REMEMBER: The Family Of Jennings "Philip" Miles. There were no flowers there when we first arrived, but during the time we were there, someone brought a pot of pink flowers and left it below the plaque.

I can't find any information about him online. Did he drown in the river?

This is the river from on top of the bridge.

This is the mossy riverbank.

This is an odd little structure that someone built on the riverbank - I have no idea when or for what purpose.

This is the bottom of the bridge.

These are some trees just beyond the bridge.

This is me, exploring the riverbank beyond the bridge.

This is Susan looking at pebbles from the river, and Boston eagerly waiting for Susan to throw some for her.

The campground is in Plumas National Forest. The tall trees we saw were mostly redwoods, white firs, yellow pines, and on the riverbanks, white alders and bigleaf maples.

Here is a bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum) in the campsite next to ours.

These are the catkins of the bigleaf maple.

This is a white alder (Alnus rhombifolia) in our campsite.

Here is Pacific mountain dogwood (Cornus nuttallii). My only regret of the camping trip is that I didn't manage to get a better picture of the large white dogwood flowers. I thought I had, but when I got home, I discovered that my dogwood pictures were all blurry, and this is the only one that was salvageable. These trees were all along the road on our way in, and there was one directly across the river from our campsite, and another one near the campground's outhouse.

This is California hazelnut (Corylus cornuta).

This is the river through some trees in our campsite. The small plants on the ground included bedstraw, horsetails, gooseberries, thimbleberries, raspberries, and American trail plant.

This is American trailplant (Adenocaulon bicolor) - called that because people walking through the woods often unknowingly turn over some of the leaves with their feet, revealing the much paler underside. This makes it easier to follow their trail. If you want to make your trail especially easy to follow, turn over the leaves so that the arrow shape of the overturned leaves point in the direction you're going.

These next two pictures show brookfoam (Boykinia major).

This is also brookfoam, but with an unidentified fern mixed in.

These are horsetails (Equisetum arvense). They look almost like tiny pine trees, but they're actually related to ferns.

Here is whitevein wintergreen (Pyrola picta).

This is a gooseberry, probably Sierra gooseberry (Ribes roezlii). It was everywhere in our campsite.

This is a thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus) in our campsite.

This shrub was everywhere, including all over our campsite. I never figured out what it was.

This is another plant in our campsite that I never managed to identify.

I never figured out what this was, either. The white bits seemed to be bracts, not flower petals.

Here's a seedling of the same thing.

On our way home, I kept asking Susan to stop the truck for a moment so I could get out and photograph the plants along the road. I should have asked her to stop and let me photograph more Pacific mountain dogwood, because there was a stand of it that would have made a perfect picture, far better than the only one I ended up being able to salvage. But the first plant I actually did ask her to stop for was this rainbow iris (Iris hartwegii).

Meanwhile, I was specifically looking for this sanddune wallflower. I had seen it on our way in, and while we were there, I actually had a dream about it. In the dream, I had found an extremely unusual (read: nonexistent) variation of it that had blue flowers instead of orange flowers.

After photographing this one, I realized that there were actually quite a few others along the road. But this was the largest one, and the only one I had noticed on the way in, so it was the only one I photographed on the way out.

Here is a hillside covered with meadow larkspur (Delphinium nuttallianum).

And here's a closeup of it.

Proposition H8

2009-05-26T18:00:24Z

California: a state embroiled in a seemingly neverending budget crisis because a two-thirds majority is required to approve a budget, but where a simple 50% + 1 is sufficient to vote away the rights of minority couples to marry - even when discrimination against that group is supposed to be subject to "strict scrutiny," and even when the people never voted to remove the contradictory part of the state constitution that claims the state guarantees equal rights to everyone.

Also, the crazy Catholic self-hating lesbian on the California Supreme Court voted against her own right to marry, again. It was not a surprise, considering that she also voted against her own right to marry last May, when the majority on the court ruled that we did have the right to marry. This woman must have the most terrible commitment issues ever.

Really, the only thing that surprised me was that Justice Moreno was the only dissenter in today's decision. When I watched the oral arguments in March, I really thought that Justice Werdegar was going to dissent also.

(At least I suppose I can take some comfort in the fact that 18,000 same-sex couples who married here do get to remain married, despite the attempt by 52% of California voters to forcibly divorce them from each other. Congratulations again to misterkrista and jess_s, to Chuck B. and Guy, and to James and John.)

May Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

2009-05-15T06:42:24Z

One of the main reasons I became interested in growing California native plants was that I recognized my own brown thumb, and also recognized the fact that I would have no patience with the arduous task of watering plants regularly all summer long, which is what most non-native plants require to be able to grow here. As I learned more about California native plants, however, I began to question whether they were really any easier to grow. Most California native plants sold in nurseries are native to the foothills, where they've evolved to adapt to steeply sloped, sandy soils with perfect drainage. I live in the Sacramento Valley, with heavy clay soils that are absolutely flat and have no drainage whatsoever. There are plants native to the valley as well, of course, but a huge percentage of them are annuals, evolved to reproduce quickly and die off within a year or less, because that's the easiest way for plants to adapt to being both completely flooded in the winter and bone-dry in the summer. Gardens full of plants that all die off every year don't tend to look very good at the time of year when the plants die.

Now, however, I have resumed believing that even though plants from the California foothills aren't as well adapted to growing in the valley as I would like, they're still quite a bit easier to grow here than plants from outside of California. This is because although I've certainly had my share of native plants die in my garden, I've now made a significant effort at growing plants from the Mediterranean Basin for the first time. And it didn't go well.

Last month, as I explained shortly before last month's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, I planted six Mediterranean plants from four-inch pots: 'Provence' lavender, 'Hopley's' oregano, 'Spice Island' rosemary, Caraway thyme, 'Minus' thyme, and 'Walker's Low' catmint.This month, four of the six are dead. The only surviving intentionally planted non-California native plants in my garden now are Caraway thyme and Walker's Low catmint. I'm not really sure whether the Caraway thyme is happy either, but I suppose the good news is that at least the catmint is actively growing. It's even produced one small cluster of tiny bluish purple flowers.

Aside from the deaths of most of my Mediterranean plants, however, the month of May has mostly lived up to the promotional hype it receives from May Dreams Gardens. Most of my plants, whether or not they're blooming, have grown very noticeably in the past month. My California golden poppies, which last month were only intermittently producing a single flower at a time, are now three times their previous size and covered with many dozens of simultaneous flowers (as shown in the background below). My 'Blue Springs' beardtongue, which last month had produced only two flowers, is now covered with flowers and beginning to produce seeds as well. It's really impressing me. I need to collect the seeds and try to grow a lot more of it.

My blue flax is also still blooming away. Some days I see it without any flowers on it and I assume that its blooming season has ended, but every time this has happened, the following day it's redecorated itself with numerous flowers again.

Continuing with the blue/purple theme, one of my two silver bush lupines has produced a flower spike. I planted one of them about a month before the other - both of them this past winter - and the one I planted first has at least quintupled in size but produced no flowers, while this one hasn't yet doubled in size but has produced what you see here. I guess the first one invested so much energy into growing bigger that it had none left for making flowers, while this one invested so much energy into producing its first little flower spike that it had little left for growing bigger.

I took most of my photographs for this post yesterday, but rechecked the yard today, just on the off-chance that a new flower might show up. And one did! Last October, I scattered seeds of native blue-eyed grass, but I didn't think that any of the seeds ever actually sprouted. It turns out that at least one of them did - I just didn't recognize it until it produced this flower. (The other plant it's entangled with is a very small California golden poppy that seems not to be doing so well.)

Several other plants have buds that are right on the brink of turning into flowers. My hummingbird sage (positioned between the two rocks, below) started producing new leaves last week, and this week it sent up a flower spike with three tiers of bracts at the top. No actual flowers in the bracts yet, but I'm sure the plant's working on that.

My two native bulbs (superb Mariposa lily and soap lily) and my narrowleaf milkweed have all produced buds. The milkweed is supposed to attract monarch butterflies, but I've yet to see a single butterfly of any kind in the entire yard. I did see a ladybug on the milkweed (and also ladybug pupae on the silver bush lupine and the golden currant), so at least the milkweed is making some contribution to the local wildlife. (But the plant receiving the most attention from insects is the 'Blue Springs' beardtongue. It's permanently covered with bees, flies, ants, and some sort of shiny metallic green beetles.)

The coral bells and the red bush monkeyflower are also still blooming, although the coral bells flowers have aged from white to pink, and more than half of the red bush monkeyflower's flowers have shriveled. I'm not sure what's up with the red bush monkeyflower; I had the impression it was supposed to continue blooming well into late summer, but it appears as if its bloom season is starting to wind down. It might be getting too much sun for its tastes, but if it is, I'm not sure there's anywhere shadier in the yard that I could move it to.

My 'Golden Alexandria' wood strawberry and Susan's purple alyssum are also still blooming, as usual. (The strawberry is fruiting, too.) So I count a total of eleven plants with full-fledged flowers on them right now, plus three with buds.

Here is how the prettiest part of the garden looks right now.

Boston helped prettify it by adding her own beauty to it. Don't be fooled by the angelic look on her face, though; she dug up one of my plants a minute or two before this was taken. (I hadn't yet discovered her crime when I took the picture. It was a coral bells plant that I'd already moved because she kept stepping on it and damaging it in its previous location. I replanted it again, but I don't know whether it will recover.)

The California golden poppies seem to be sorting themselves according to the amount of sunlight they get. The ones in full sun (which is most of them) are all solid orange, while the ones in part shade are all orange in the center but yellow around the edge. The foliage looks the same on both. My seeds came from a variety of sources, including storebought solid orange seeds and some seeds that my father collected in his garden, which contains a mixture of solid orange (from his own storebought seeds) and these two-colored ones (which are native where he lives). I've seen both kinds growing wild around here, and I think both kinds are actually native here.

Here's the less pretty side of the yard. I scattered plenty of California golden poppy seeds here too, and got a few seedlings, but they're all still tiny and not blooming. Most of this side of the yard was flooded all winter, so I think that's what stopped the poppies from growing. Bermuda grass is now taking over this portion of the yard. It was here last summer too, but it vanished almost completely during the winter.

To conclude this post, I have two plants that haven't bloomed at all but that are nonetheless completely amazing me. First, here's Fort Miller fairyfan (a.k.a. farewell-to-spring). It's an annual wildflower, so I assumed when I scattered the seeds last November that it would be an itty-bitty thing, maybe six to twelve inches tall. Only one seedling survived the winter, but it's up to the height of my shoulder! It's the tallest plant I've planted, significantly taller than my redbud tree. And a month from now, it might be ready to bloom.

Finally, here's the pink-flowering currant I bought last month and promptly accidentally stepped on, snapping off its trunk at ground level. It's now resprouted lushly from its roots and is recovering nicely. (And I put a rock next to it to help remind me not to walk there.)

The City That Hates Trees

2009-05-10T12:07:38Z

In January, about a week after I finished moving in with Susan, I witnessed something strange: a bunch of men using cranes to drape black netting over all the trees in the park that serves as the town square of the town where I now live. I wondered what in the world they were doing that for, but it never occurred to me to fear the netting would be left there long-term. Yet that's what's happened. Nearly five months later, all 15 trees in this section of the park - mostly elm trees, ranging from 30 to 100 feet tall - remain completely enclosed in black netting, with no prospect of the netting being removed anytime soon.

Why? Because the city council hates trees. Really, that's about the sum of it. The city council has been attempting to sell the park for several years now - yes, that's right, I live in a town that's trying to sell its own town square! - to companies that would like to turn the park into a parking lot. But the attempted sales were blocked because the city council hadn't completed the required environmental impact report. That report is now completed, so the city is once again trying to sell the park. One of the environmental impacts the city now fears could block the next attempted sale is the fact that it is illegal to destroy the habitat of certain rare birds by chopping down trees that those rare birds are nesting in.

To make sure the trees can legally be chopped down to build a parking lot, the city has wrapped the trees in black netting for the foreseeable future, so that those rare birds can't possibly nest in these trees. In other words, the city council has reacted to the environmental laws intended to prevent the destruction of rare birds' habitat by intentionally destroying the rare birds' habitat even sooner than this habitat would have been destroyed with no such environmental laws in place.

Due to the fact that the town is surrounded on two sides by rivers and on all four sides by levees, the town only has two roads that lead in or out of it in a total of four directions. Those two roads (Highway 20 and Highway 70) intersect in the middle of town, and this park is located at that intersection. In other words, anyone who drives through the town from any direction can't possibly fail to notice the park full of netted trees.

Where Taco Died

2009-04-27T22:05:58Z

These are my photographs of the campground where we lost Taco. I have no pictures of Taco himself there.

These are some old logs in our campsite. You can see a bit of our tent in the background.

This plant is called mountain misery (Chamaebatia foliolosa). I don't know why it's called that, but our campsite was completely surrounded by this stuff on all sides - which, in retrospect, seems unfortunately appropriate. I actually picked out this campsite specifically because it was surrounded by mountain misery - since all the other campsites were surrounded by poison oak instead, and also had poison oak growing all over the ground in the middle of the campsites too. Ours had a bit of poison oak in the middle and a bit more around the edges, but much less than the others. We had more mountain misery instead.

We also had many young madrone trees (Arbutus menziesii) in our campsite. I was trying to photograph this one (the shrub in the right foreground) when Boston decided that she wanted to pose next to it. The trees shown are redwood (Sequoia gigantea) at left, interior live oak (Quercus wislizenii) in the background, and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) at right.

Even though it's a bit blurry, I really love this picture of Boston running gleefully through our campsite early Saturday morning. (That's a whole grove of young madrones she was running through.)

These are Mexican pinks (Silene laciniata) that I saw along the road when I took Boston for a walk on the trail Saturday morning, while Susan and Taco were napping in the tent.

This is the creek that the trail crossed over. This is also where I had to return to the campsite for new camera batteries.

This is the same creek, facing downstream instead. By this point I had come back with Susan, and we had left Taco behind.

These flowers are called Pacific bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa) - another eerily appropriate plant name. They were growing everywhere along the road to the campground, and I kept hoping to see them up close after we arrived. We finally found them along the trail. Shortly after we found them, we turned back the way we had come.

When we crossed back over that same creek, I noticed tiny shooting stars (Dodecatheon clevelandii) growing next to the creek. They were so tiny that it was impossible to get a good photograph of them. If you can see three pale lavender blurs on the end of a tall red stem toward the left . . . those are them.

While I was trying to photograph the shooting stars, Boston was posing expectantly in the creek.

Then we reached the start of the trail again and discovered that Taco was missing. We spent all afternoon searching for him, and much of the evening, so I took no more pictures that day.

On Sunday morning I suddenly noticed moose horn violets (Viola lobata) all along the road. I had walked past here many times before without noticing them.

We returned to the trailhead area to search for Taco one more time. This is the trailhead. The trail went up along that diagonal log in the distance and over the ridge. Taco followed us over the ridge, but hardly any farther than that at all.

This exposed cliff was across the road from the trailhead, in the direction of our campsite. The steepness and especially the total absence of vegetation on the sides of it indicate that it didn't erode that way naturally; it was damaged by hydraulic mining during the gold rush. Hydraulic mining methods poisoned cliffsides by concentrating toxic heavy metals, and hard-rock mining further poisoned them by using arsenic or mercury to leach gold from solid rock. As a result, no plants can grow in the poisoned areas.

This dead tree was down the road, behind the campsite of the last people who saw Taco. They said he went in this general direction.

So we went the same direction. Beyond the dead tree was a pile of mine tailings, further evidence of the lingering environmental destruction wrought by the Gold Rush.

Beyond the mine tailings was a pond surrounded by more dead trees. An old tire was floating in the pond.

It seemed like an appropriate place to die, surrounded by so much devastation.

Somewhere around here, Taco must have walked off into the underbrush and never come out again.

The last photograph I took was of the flowers growing near where Taco disappeared. These are buckbrush flowers (Ceanothus cuneatus).

R.I.P. Taco

2009-04-27T04:34:41Z

Susan and I took Taco and Boston camping this weekend, but we came back home with only Boston. We lost Taco. Literally lost him. We have no choice but to assume that he's dead.

I didn't even get around to taking any pictures of him on this camping trip before we lost him, so here's a picture of him at PiPi Campground in August 2007, the first camping trip I ever went on with him.

Taco was 14 years old. He'd been Susan's for more than a third of her life. Over half her adult life. And he'd been getting sicker and sicker. The vet told us in December 2007 that he had terminal cancer invading his vena cava, doubling his heart rate. The cancer had also permanently raised his adrenaline levels, causing his pupils to remain constantly dilated (part of the "fight or flight" reaction) and probably giving him a constant sense of being filled with the kind of nervous energy anyone feels in an adrenaline rush. The vet implied he had maybe three months to live, maybe even less, and would probably die instantly of a heart attack. There was an operation that could have let him live twelve months, except that there was a very high chance he'd die on the operating table and get zero months instead. We chose to skip the operation. He amazed everyone by living sixteen more months.

He wasn't healthy by any means. He was covered with fatty tumors - one on his eyelid, dozens all over his sides, a few on his legs. Skin tags, too. Two inches long and at least half an inch wide, dangling from his thigh like a small extra penis that had been horribly misplaced. And then there were the skin cancers - dark, irregular moles all over his belly and sides, showing through his extremely thin fur. At all hours of night, he kept licking and chewing them; they must have itched. He licked them through so much of the night that by morning, his saliva had formed puddles that soaked through the comforter and the sheets, and we woke up wondering why we were lying in puddles. He also had a few bald spots, where the bare skin had lately darkened from his usual pink to the dark, dull brown of drying mud. It had cracked like drying mud too, all through. His nose was the same - cracked and mud-colored, instead of its previous black. And whenever his eyes were half-closed, which was usually many times per day, they appeared to be completely filled with deep red blood - no whites and no irises, nothing but deep pools of blood. He looked as if he were already dead.

He also smelled that way. The stench he emitted from his ass several hundred times daily convinced us that every skunk in the county had relocated to his intestines and died there. This had been the case from the time I first met him. More recently, he had also been afflicted with constant diarrhea - diarrhea so liquid that it looked like pee coming out of the wrong orifice. I don't think he had produce any solid poop in at least six months. He drank gallons of water every day, trying to regain what he kept losing through his back end.

I don't want to give the impression that he was ugly or unpleasant to be around. He was ugly and unpleasant to inhale the odors of, but he was also very cute - I could see the younger dog in him at certain moments, particularly when he was having fun - and very, very, very much loved.

But he was also dying. Quite visibly. We didn't think of it as dying, exactly, because you could see that his mind was still lively and vibrant. He still loved to play fetch, even though we always had to toss the toys directly into his mouth from two feet away, because otherwise he had no hope of beating Boston to them. But on recent walks in the neighborhood, he'd walked slower and slower, having trouble keeping up. We thought of it as "slowing down." Of course we knew he was dying, because the vet had told us so, but that was in the abstract, sixteen months ago. Who knew how much longer he might last before it actually happened? He was alive; how can you ever imagine that a dog who's very much alive at that particular moment might suddenly not be alive anymore an hour later?

So anyway, we took him camping. He loved camping, so we wanted to make sure he got to enjoy at least one more camping trip in his life. We left Friday, around 4:00 p.m., and Susan drove to a place not much more than an hour's drive away, perhaps 2,500 feet in elevation. Unfortunately, it was still cold even that low, at this point in the year, so Taco shivered that evening - he didn't have much fur to keep him warm. But he'd shivered on other camping trips too, and he was always welcome to go into the tent and into the sleeping bags if he wanted to get warmer. We shivered ourselves, and Susan built a fire, then we went to bed early to get warmer. Taco decided to sleep on top of the sleeping bags that night, but Susan put a blanket over him to keep him warm.

Saturday morning was also cold, so Susan built a fire again, and we spent the morning reading in the campsite. Late in the morning, Susan took a nap in the tent, and Taco took a nap with her, while I took Boston for a walk around the campground. On our walk, we discovered a trailhead and walked a little way down the trail, until my camera batteries went dead and I turned back.

At the campsite, I replaced my camera batteries and stuck some extras in the pocket of my jeans. Boston wasted no time in waking Susan up, so all four of us sat around the campsite for a while again, until all four of us headed for the trail. Susan's camping book, which we had used when deciding where to go camping, had mentioned that there was a trail at this campground and that the trail passed through some pretty wildflowers, so of course I had immediately wanted to hike on the trail, and Susan had planned to hike on it with me. The trailhead was two blocks from our campsite, and Taco lagged behind us the whole way. When we started down the trail itself, he kept lagging even farther behind, so that before we had been walking even two minutes down the trail, we had lost sight of him. We weren't even walking fast at all; Boston was running ahead, and I started walking at my normal (slower than Susan's) pace, but I soon stopped to wait for Susan, who was walking much slower than was at all normal, because she was trying to wait for Taco. She couldn't see him anywhere. He had definitely started down the trail with us, but he was walking far too slowly to have any hope of finishing.

We always have the dogs off the leash most of the time when we're camping, and they both always wander around out of our sight fairly often, but they always seem to return to our campsite reliably. We decided that Taco would know to go back to our campsite if he couldn't keep up with us, so we continued down the trail. We crossed two creeks and a rocky ridge or two, but we never actually arrived at any end to the trail - we just decided to turn around, and we retraced our steps.

Taco wasn't on the trail, and he wasn't at our campsite either. There were people in a campsite next to the trailhead, so Susan asked them if they'd seen Taco. Yes, they had. Taco had turned around and exited the trail, then wandered through their campsite - in a direction completely away from where we'd been walking, and also completely away from our campsite.

He could have been randomly exploring, which would be typical of him on a normal camping trip but doesn't make much sense for him to do at a time when he so obviously didn't have any energy at all for keeping up with us. He could have suddenly completely lost all sense of direction and believed that either we or the campsite were located in a drastically different direction from him than either we or the campsite actually were, but for a dog who had always previously seemed perfectly able to find his way anywhere he wanted, and who had seen us go down the very same trail that he then turned around and went the complete opposite way from, that doesn't make much sense either. It wasn't as if he could have been looking for an easier way to the same location as us; the trail we had taken was extremely easy, and remained so until far beyond the point at which he turned back. Also, Susan maintains that if he had been thinking anything at all like his normal self, he would have definitely known to go back to the campsite and wait for us there. Why would he suddenly behave differently than he would have in the past?

So we don't know what happened. Did he sense he was about to die and intentionally go looking for a hiding place to do it in? Susan says that dogs don't do that, only cats, and that Taco in particular would never have wanted to be alone when he was dying. Also, the vet had told us that when he died, it would probably be of a heart attack, and it would probably kill him instantly. Was he just exploring after all, and never knew what hit him?

There was quite a lot of afternoon left, and we spent it all searching for Taco. Around and around, even back down the trail again, even though we knew he had left it - just in case he might have later returned to it. There was no way he could possibly have gone very far, when he was too exhausted to keep up with us even while we were trying to slow down to wait for him. I walked down to where I had a clear view of the hillside below the portion of the trail he'd been on, and a clear view of the creek below it, so that just in case he had returned to the trail and then fallen downhill from it, I should have been able to see him - no matter whether he landed anywhere on the hillside or down in the creek itself. But he just wasn't there at all. We walked around the area where he was last seen, and as far as we could beyond that, in the direction he'd been seen going. We called him, over and over. But we couldn't go very far in the direction he'd last been seen going, because there were no trails - just solid underbrush, and it was very thickly overgrown with poison oak. We could have gotten lost ourselves and still never found him.

When dinnertime arrived, the people who'd last seen him had a barbecue dinner. Anyone who ever witnessed Taco in the same room as food knows that there's no way in the world that Taco wouldn't follow the smell of a barbecue. (Heck, earlier that same day, I'd already caught him entering a different campsite in the morning just to eat dry dog food out of some strangers' dog's food dish. I had to apologize for his behavior to them. And he didn't even like dry dog food; he always refused to eat it when we gave it to him, and held out as long as he could for people food instead, or at least canned dog food.) And anyone who witnessed how slowly Taco had been walking that afternoon would know that he couldn't possibly have walked far enough to be out of smelling distance of that barbecue. So from the fact that he didn't come to that barbecue, and also the fact that he didn't come or respond with any noises when we called him, I conclude that he was already dead by mid-afternoon Saturday.

He didn't show up that night either, nor this morning - we didn't leave until afternoon today. Susan is still frantically worrying that he might somehow possibly be alive out there, suffering and wondering where we are. I do understand why she can't get that theoretical possibility out of her head, but realistically I know that he's not out there. He's just not. I wish desperately that I could find him and bring him back to her, but I also know, after all the searching we did and after the barbecue, that he's dead. That he was dead yesterday, before dinner time, probably before we even started searching for him at.

Susan is desperately regretting our decision to continue the hike and trust that he would return to our campsite on his own. I'm regretting it too, because obviously if we had turned back, we would at least have been able to be there with him when he died. But at the same time, the more that I think about it, the more that I start to realize that none of our alternative options were very good either. Even though he was walking slowly, he never seemed like he was about to drop dead. He seemed happy and vibrant, just not able to move very fast. We could have turned around and taken him back to our campsite and tied him up there, then continued hiking - but if the experience of us leaving him behind by himself was what raised his heart rate to the point of killing him, wouldn't it have still killed him exactly the same if we'd left him at the campsite? Or if he was going to die that afternoon regardless of whether we left him behind or not, wouldn't leaving him tied up at the campsite and returning to find him dead there still leave us feeling equally as if our leaving him behind was what killed him?

So the only way to avoid that guilt would have been to skip the hike entirely, to cancel our plans and avoid doing anything that Taco wasn't strong enough to accompany us in. But why would we do that when we didn't think he was going to die? He just seemed like he was walking slowly, which he'd been doing a lot of lately. He didn't seem like he was about to drop dead. Yes, the vet had told us he could die any day now, but the vet had told us that sixteen months ago, and something approaching 500 days had passed since then without him dying yet. Should we have put our lives on hold for sixteen months, avoiding ever doing anything that Taco might not be able to do along with us? Staying home with him at all times for fear that leaving him by himself would stress him out to the point of bringing on the fatal heart attack? By not putting our lives on hold, by continuing to go camping and walking with him, we were able to bring him on four camping trips and numerous walks during those sixteen months - camping trips and walks that he very obviously enjoyed. If we'd skipped all those camping trips and walks and just stayed home with him all the time for sixteen months to try to prevent his heart from ever experiencing any stress at all, his final sixteen months would have been less happy than they were. And how long would we even have been able to prolong his life that way anyway? He might have survived yesterday intact, only to die of a heart attack this morning when some noise outside from the mail carrier or the like got him all excited and sent him running out through the pet door into the side yard and barking his head off, as so often happened.

Of course I wish - desperately - that it had happened differently, so that we would have his body to help assuage Susan's fears of him still being out there, and so that she could somehow be persuaded not to blame herself for his death. But I think he would have been hard-pressed to find any way of dying that wouldn't feel suspiciously like it was our fault. If we'd been walking with him or at home playing with him, we'd worry that we encouraged him to over-exert himself; if we'd been near him but ignoring him, we'd worry that we should have been paying more attention to him; if we'd been anywhere away from him, we'd worry, as we're doing now, that we should have been with him. If he had died barking at the mail carrier after sixteen months of us studiously avoiding ever leaving him alone or paying attention to anything but him or encouraging him to exert himself in any way, we would wish we had taken him on more camping trips and more hikes while he was still alive, so that his final sixteen months would have been happier.

He's found his way of dying, now. Inevitably, it feels like the worst possible way he could have died. And inevitably, we fill in all the details we don't know about what really happened to him by projecting our worst fears into the spaces - such as Susan's fear that he's still alive out there. But the worst possible thing that could have happened does not become the most likely - or even at all likely - by virtue of being the worst.

The truth - the only portion of the truth I can really know, since I will never really know how he died - is that he was an old dog who had lived a good life and been loved as much as any dog in the whole world ever could have been loved. He knew it very well and used it to great advantage regularly (successfully begging table scraps from Susan nearly daily). He lived the happiest 14 years that any dog could possibly wish for. And now he's gone. And his body will remain in the mountains there, in a bed of pine needles or wherever he came to rest. The scenery around him is beautiful, and even though he won't be able to see it anymore now, he did love it while he was alive. And I don't think he would have wanted to go on living forever, with his diarrhea and his skin cancer and his other cancer and his overall energy level continuing to get worse and worse for all time. He had been in the process of dying for a long time, and now he doesn't have to do it ever again.

Also, I want to help lessen my fiancée's guilt and devastation over this, and I don't know how.

Native Plant Garden Photo Contest

2009-04-24T07:47:22Z

Gardening Gone Wild is having a native plant garden photo contest. Participants can enter up to three photos. Here are mine. The first one is red bush monkeyflower (Mimulus puniceus) in my front garden bed this morning, with coral bells (Heuchera maxima) in the background. Both plants are native to southern California. (I'm in northern California, but these plants are under the eaves where they get less rain, making the environment closer to souther California's.) The monkeyflower just started blooming last week, for the first time.

The garden photos aren't required to be of our own gardens, and since I've only been gardening for just about exactly one year, restricting myself to my own tiny, barely established (though very native) garden would severely limit my chances. So this next photo is of Pacific madrone (Arbutus menziesii) in the California State University, Sacramento Arboretum in July 2007.

And I'm not entirely sure that this third photo even qualifies, since I'm not sure whether the plant was actually planted intentionally by a gardener. But growing through a chain-link fence the way it is, I'm not sure it can be considered exactly "wild" either; it's been smoothly integrated into the obviously artificial landscaping below it. This is endangered Pine Hill flannelbush (Fremontodendron californicum ssp. decumbens), growing on Pine Hill in May 2008. I'm not quite completely happy with the composition of this one, but the plant itself is so spectacular that it hardly matters. How could anyone look at this and not want it in their garden?

Civil War II

2009-04-17T04:39:55Z

Why is hardly anyone talking about the utter lunacy that the Georgia state senate voted 43 to 1 to support? Why do people go around accusing Democrats of being "anti-American" for any un-Republican statements they ever make, yet when the Georgia state senate votes overwhelmingly to secede from the United States and declare the United States "disbanded" as a nation, nobody seems to get particularly upset about how anti-American that is? And since this thing the Georgia state senate voted for states in part that the federal government has no authority to prosecute any crimes other than "treason, piracy and slavery," why do none of these same Georgia state senators seem to have considered the idea that declaring the United States to have been "disbanded" as a nation sounds an awful lot like an incitement to begin committing treason?

Meanwhile, the governor of Texas has apparently declared an interest in seceding from the United States too! legolastn commented, "Is it really coincidence that the Georgia Senate and the Texas Governor have started touting secessionist rhetoric while the nation is being [led] by its first black President? Somehow I think not." Unfortunately, I have to agree.

April Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

2009-04-15T01:53:57Z

Now that yesterday's post about the less beautiful aspects of my garden is out of the way, it's time once again for Garden Blogger's Bloom Day. And unlike last month's Bloom Day, I finally have more intentional flowers than weed flowers!

This is the flower bed in front of our front door. Susan planted the yellow snapdragons and the purple flowers (whatever they are) before I met her, in a little rectangular bed encompassing only those two and the space between them (which used to have some other kind flower in it that died long ago). Last November, I expanded the bed into a quarter-circle and added the large rock, a monkeyflower (not pictured here because it's not blooming yet) and coral bells. Since then I've also added larkspur (not pictured here because it's not blooming either). But the coral bells are blooming, as are the two surviving flowers that Susan planted.

The coral bells (Heuchera maxima) started blooming in late March, not long after Bloom Day.

The snapdragons started blooming a week or so later.

The purple flowers seem to bloom the entire year long; I just forgot to mention them for last month's Bloom Day because they're not really my flowers and I don't even know what they are. Anybody recognize them?

In the back yard, my first golden poppy bloomed on April Fool's Day. Unfortunately, the flower only lasted two days before I found it lying on the ground, broken off from the plant. I thought the dogs had chewed it off, but the second one didn't bloom until yesterday and was broken off already today. The poppy foliage never looks chewed, so it seems unlikely that the dogs would be selectively breaking off just the flower stalks. It also seems unlikely that the dogs would leave anything lying next to the plant in perfect condition except for the fact that it's no longer attached to the plant. So I don't think the dogs are the culprit after all; I think there's something wrong with my poppies themselves, that their stems aren't strong enough to support the weight of their own flowers. I've never heard of poppies having this problem before. Anybody know what could be wrong with them?

My blue flax (Linum lewisii) started blooming in the first week of April. Its flowers have all been falling off in a day or two also, but in its case I don't find them lying on the ground destroyed; the petals just fall off, and the plant makes more flowers in no time at all. Yesterday it was down to nothing but buds, and today it has five new flowers on it.

It's the straight species, not a cultivar, so I was pleasantly surprised by how blue the flowers are. I've often seen pictures of blue flax with much paler flowers than this.

My foothill beardtongue (Penstemon heterophyllus 'Blue Springs') has its first two blue flowers, and dozens of tiny pink buds up above them. This one is reputed to be quite a showstopper when covered with flowers, so I look forward to seeing the rest of the flowers open up.

The two intentional flowers I had for last month's Bloom Day are still around. The golden currant's (Ribes aureum) flower show is definitely winding down, but it still has this one remaining cluster of yellow flowers.

And although I've only owned the strawberry (Fragaria vesca 'Golden Alexandra') since November, I get the impression it flowers pretty much all year round. It hasn't stopped flowering yet, anyway - although it has stopped fruiting at the moment. Which is a bit sad, because even though its strawberries are always tiny, they do taste good.

The tiny white bloom show of one of my two weed flowers last month is winding down now, but not completely gone yet. This is the weedy native bittercress Cardamine oligosperma) that hitchhiked into my yard in the pot that the native golden currant came in.

The other weed flower from last month, blackdisk medic (Medicago orbicularis), is gone now - not only because its flowering season is over, but also because a few days ago, I pulled it. It wasn't causing a problem in itself, but it wasn't doing an adequate job of preventing other weeds from growing where it was growing. Instead, it was just hiding the other weeds from me so I couldn't pull them as well. I executed it for harboring the enemy.

Lastly, I acquired these new flowers by buying the plant with the flowers already on it. So I didn't help produce them, but they're my flowers now! This is evergreen currant (Ribes viburnifolium), from Windmill Nursery.

I commented in yesterday's post that although most of my garden is still far from beautiful, more and more of it is at least starting to look recognizably like a garden. Here is what I mean.

The tiny plant in the foreground below is a California fuchsia (Epilobium canum), recovering now after dying back almost to the ground over the winter. In the middle ground, in front of the next large rock, is a California golden poppy and my new Hopley's oregano. Farther back, from left to right, are the blue flax, foothill beardtongue, a footprint-shaped stepping-stone, an amazingly fast-growing silver bush lupine (Lupinus albifrons) that I just planted in January, more poppies, two native bulbs you can't really see, another footprint-shaped stepping-stone, and the redbud tree (with more poppies in front of it).

The plants are all rather small still, and that irritating annual bluegrass is still invading all the brown spaces between them - but you can look at it now and recognize that someone is at least attempting to put in a garden here. Six months ago, you couldn't tell that. And one year ago, nobody was attempting it yet.

Garden Update

2009-04-13T21:46:14Z

This month's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day is coming soon, and I'm saving my flower pictures for then. But in the meantime, I have a lot of other gardening news to catch up with. And it's still, well, rather easy to take photographs of my garden without including any flowers.

I'd actually been feeling pretty good about the garden lately. Most of it is far from beautiful, but more and more of it is at least starting to look recognizably like a garden. I was going to show you the photograph below and exclaim with pride that finally, at long last, there were hardly any weeds visible at all.

Except . . . see all that stuff along the house that looks like a tall grass? I had thought that was something I planted, but I realized while writing this post that it's a weed, yellow nutsedge (Carex esculentus). It's not just along the house, either; a whole lot of the green clumps you see in the middle are the same stuff. It's native, but allelopathic - meaning that it might chemically kill my other plants - and it's almost impossible to remove, because it resprouts from "nuts" left behind in the soil after you pull it. Most herbicides are also incapable of killing the nuts. I did identify some yellow nutsedge in the yard last summer, and sprayed it with herbicide, and it turned brown and looked dead, so I thought that took care of the problem. But it resprouted, and I failed to recognize it as the same stuff until now. I will have to try to dig it out, and I will undoubtedly fail. It tends to establish itself in areas with poor drainage, which out yard has certainly suffered from plenty of - but it doesn't go away, even if the drainage improves.

I also have a few other volunteers I haven't been able to identify yet.

And I have some potted seedlings whose identities I'm not sure of either. This one has to be from seeds I planted, because it's sprouted in many different pots and nowhere else. But the seeds must have been mislabeled, because it doesn't even vaguely resemble anything whose seeds I intended to buy. What in the world is it? Can anyone tell me?

I'm hoping this one is my native coyote mint (Monardella villosa), because if it isn't, I don't know what it is and I don't know where my coyote mint went.

I have some interesting new volunteer species sprouting that I can identify, too, including three more native volunteer species. This is fringed willowherb (Epilobium ciliatum) when it first sprouted in late March. (Actually, two of them sprouted, on opposite sides of the yard, but Boston dug one of them up and hid it from me. Oh well.) It's a somewhat weedy native, but it will produce nice pink flowers, and I'm really very happy to have it.

And this (on the left) is the exact same plant now - less than one month later. It's growing incredibly fast! On the right is my grapevine (Vitis californica), which has just leafed out for the spring. (And underneath them are weeds. Icky weeds I can't seem to kill.)

This is my second native volunteer species, common bedstraw (Galium aparine). The entire plant is very sticky and unpleasant to touch. It's nowhere near as welcome as the fringed willowherb, and I'd pull it if it grew in my main gardening area. But it's only growing in the front yard, in my drainage ditch (as shown) and in what's left of the lawn (which has almost entirely transformed into a weed patch, due to the fact that we never water it ever). So I don't mind it growing there; we'd have worse things growing there if this weren't there.

And this is a volunteer pine tree seedling - probably the native grey pine (Pinus sabiniana), judging by the color. I need to move it somewhere else; it's currently growing one foot from the house, in the gravel under the front garden hose.

Oh, and my volunteer carrot has died - I think the dogs dug it up. Oh well.

A baby strawberry is sprouting, presumably the offspring of my adult native wood strawberry (Fragaria vesca 'Golden Alexandra'). They can reproduce by seed (in which case the baby wouldn't belong to the cultivar 'Golden Alexandra') or by underground runners (in which case it would). It's sprouting about six feet from the parent, which seems surprisingly far for underground runners to have traveled from a plant I just planted last November, but who knows?

My native valley sedge (Carex barbarae) is definitely spreading by underground runners, because it hasn't flowered or produced any seeds yet. But its babies are only sprouting about four inches away from the parent. (In the photo, to the lower left of the main clump, you can see some blades sprouting from a different center than the others.) I'm considering transplanting the new clump farther away, to help the sedge cover more space in a shorter time. According to the Internet, this species is easily divided and survives transplants very well. However, the sedge had already produced one small offshoot clump in its pot before I bought it, and I attempted to divide that clump from the parent when I first planted it. I was unable to divide it, because the roots were so tightly intertwined. This could have been only because the two clumps had been crowded into a pot together, but I've been hesitant to try again with the latest clump after the failure with the first one.

I bought a native milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis) last November, after it had already lost its leaves for the winter, so it just looked like a couple of bare greenish twigs. It's begun leafing out now, so I can finally get some idea of what it's going to look like.

Last week I attended a class in Sacramento called "How to Get a Job with the State." On my way back home, I stopped at Windmill Nursery in Carmichael - the suburb of Sacramento that I grew up in - and bought three plants. One was a clustered field sedge (Carex praegracilis). It's about six inches tall and won't get much taller. Some people plant entire lawns of this, and then they never have to mow it.

Another was a half-native grass (Festuca idahoensis x ovina-glauca 'Siskiyou Blue'). This is a three-way hybrid in which sheep fescue (native to other parts of the United States, but not to California) was crossed with blue fescue (native to Europe) and the result was then crossed with Idaho fescue (native to California, as well as to Idaho). It should grow to be about two feet tall and two feet wide. I'm a bit concerned about how to keep it alive, though; apparently it doesn't like heat and also doesn't like shade, and since we get very hot summers here, the only way to protect it from extremely severe heat here is to put it in the shade. I put it in part shade near the front door. The bit of wilted-looking green grass to the right of it is California melic (Melica californica), which I've been growing from seed from Theodore Payne, in pots. What you see is my first effort to transplant one of the clumps from a pot into the ground. I'm not sure yet whether it's going to survive or not.

You don't get to see the third plant I bought from Windmill Nursery yet, because it has flowers on it, so I'm saving it for Bloom Day. But I have other new plants to show you! Last fall, back when I still had a job and didn't yet live here, I ordered some plants online from a website called Pantry Garden Herbs. I didn't realize until later that the small print said the plants wouldn't be delivered until April. I wondered whether the order would even go through, because they also didn't charge my credit card until April, and my billing address changed during that time. But it did go through, and the plants finally arrived. None of the plants I ordered from Pantry Garden Herbs are native; they're all Mediterranean herbs. Here's oregano (Origanum laevigatum 'Hopley's'), planted next to a California golden poppy (Eschscholzia californica).

Here's rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis 'Spice Island').

And thyme (Thymus herba-barona 'Caraway'). This is supposed to spread rapidly, so I put it in a place where I very much hope it does.

This is another thyme (Thymus serpyllum 'Minus'). This one is prettier but doesn't grow as fast or taste as good (supposedly; I haven't tasted either of them so far).

This is lavender (Lavandula x intermedia 'Provence'), with icky nutsedge in the background.

I also bought catmint (Nepeta x faassenii 'Walker's Low'). I broke off a leaf for Stardust before I planted it. She was delighted.

And I mail-ordered two native plants last month from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply. One was mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus betuloides). I hadn't expected the red tinge on its leaves, which has only increased since I planted it - now pretty much the entire plant is red, with little or no green left. It seems healthy enough, just a different color than I had expected. It's an odd and interesting plant.

The other was pink flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum). It arrived looking like what you see here, about six inches tall, obviously pruned on one side to fit into the package, but covered with pinkish buds. They were foliage buds, not flower buds; after a week, they began to open into leaves. The following week, however, I was out weeding in the garden and stepped backward, then heard an ominous cracking noise. I had stepped on my pink flowering currant, snapping the trunk off an inch above ground level. I can only hope it recovers and grows back.

Homophobia on Amazon.com

2009-04-12T23:54:38Z

Queer books listed on Amazon.com and its international affiliate sites have lately been losing their sales rank statistics and ceasing to show up in certain searches. In response to an inquiry about this from gay novelist Mark R. Probst, Amazon has explained that it been removing its sales rank statistics from books with content it deems "adult," to prevent them from showing up in certain searches. Mark R. Probst has posted a screenshot of Amazon's explanation here.

Concerned witnesses are compiling a list of the book titles affected here. Having read many of these books myself, I can assure you that a great many of them have absolutely no sex in them whatsoever. They range from the most utterly un-prurient Victorian novels such as E. M. Forster's Maurice to modern children's books such as Lesléa Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies (click and look! it's been stripped of its sales rank!) to nonfiction such as Shane L. Windmeyer's The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, John J. McNeill's The Church and The Homosexual, and Kate Bornstein's Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws.

Amazon's formula for defining books as "adult" appears to be triggered by the specific words "lesbian" and "gay." For example, one edition of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness was subtitled "A 1920s Classic of Lesbian Fiction." That edition has had its sales rank removed, while editions without the subtitle still have their sales rank. (vashtan correctly points out that the only "sex scene" in The Well of Loneliness consists in its entirety of the words "And that night they were not divided.")

Classifying any book with the words "lesbian" or "gay" in its title as "adult" is like classifying any book with the words "husband" or "wife" in its title as "adult." Exactly like the words "husband" and "wife," the words "lesbian" and "gay" are used to specify the gender of a partner in a romantic relationship. This does not usually entail describing sexual encounters! In fact, unlike the words "husband" and "wife," which tend to imply that the people in question do have sex or at least did have sex at some point or other, the words "lesbian" and "gay" do not even imply that sex has ever happened at all (much as some of us might wish that being lesbian or gay automatically guaranteed sex . . .). Amazon would never in a million years use a formula that automatically classified books with the words "husband" or "wife" in the titles as "adult." If they did, the entire Disney empire and Grimm's Fairy Tales 95% of all children's books everywhere would be classified as "adult."

Amazon's formula indicates that Amazon believes our entire existences as families are unsuitable for children to know about. Many of these books were written specifically for children (such as Lesléa Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies was) or for teenagers. To deem them "adult" and restrict access accordingly is to destroy their entire purpose. Yet Amazon believes the words "lesbian" or "gay" are words children need to be protected from ever hearing.

(Update: Now that there's been a huge Internet uproar about the issue, Amazon has changed its form letter responses to say that they recognize this as being a problem and are working on fixing it. Still no explanation of how the problem happened in the first place, though - unless you count the fact that a former employee named Mike Daisey seems to think he knows what happened.)

Additional links can be found here and here. Thanks to mariness for passing this on.

Happy 17th Birthday to My Queerness!

2009-04-08T16:42:59Z

This is the year it will graduate from high school. Do you think that when it turns 18, it will gain the legal right to get married?

In the meantime, congratulations to the queernesses of Iowans, Vermonters, and D.C. residents.

Table Mountain, Oroville

2009-03-30T20:07:05Z

Yesterday, Susan and I took the dogs to Table Mountain in Oroville. It was only a half-hour drive, and the mountain is famous for its spring wildflower displays. We went a little early in the season, but the array of flowers was already impressive. Even more impressive to me, however, was the intense greennness of the wooded areas we drove through on the east side of the mountain. Tragically, I didn't get any pictures of these areas, because there weren't many good places to stop the car, and because I thought I could take some on the way back instead. But on the way back we went around the west side of the mountain, which turned out not to be half as beautiful a drive. Oh well. Even if I had gotten pictures, it would be impossible for you to look at the pictures without concluding that I must have just quintupled the saturation of the color green to make the pictures artificially greener than the actual place. The actual place was the greenest place I've ever seen. I'd had no idea that oak trees, which are the dominant tree all over the Sacramento Valley but which are normally seen in various muted shades from olive green to grey-green, could be so bright a green. It was amazing. I wonder whether they're still as green later in the season, or just for a few weeks in spring.

At least I got pictures of the top of the mountain, which was less green but contained the largest number of wildflowers. Here is Susan with the dogs, sitting amid native annual sky lupines (the blue flowers: Lupinus nanus) and goldfields (the yellow flowers: Lasthenia californica).

I suppose this is a sort of picture of the greenness. It shows the road we drove up, and the flat "tables" that give the mountain its name, and Lake Oroville in the background to the east. Table Mountain is divided into a north table (on the left) and a south table (on the right). The road we took came around the east side of the south table, bordering Lake Oroville, and then curved around the south table to the portion of road you can see in this picture.

Here's another view from just slightly higher up, standing on part of the north table. Since Susan is into geology, I asked her on the way up the mountain why the mountain is shaped the way it is. She said the top is covered with basaltic rock from an old lava flow, which is harder and less easily eroded than the sedimentary rock beneath, which caused it to erode into table shapes. She also ventured a guess that the lava flow could have come from Mount Lassen - which we researched online after we returned home, and we found that Susan's guess had been correct. Mount Lassen is 100 miles north of Table Mountain, and is 10,457 feet above sea level, compared to Table Mountain's mere 1,565 feet. Mount Lassen is part of the Cascade range, whereas Table Mountain is at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas, but an eruption of Mount Lassen in the late Cenozoic era produced basaltic lava flows that covered what is now Table Mountain.

The table surface of the north table is mostly treeless, and looks like this. Again, the yellow is goldfields and the blue is sky lupine.

Here's what the goldfields and the sky lupine look like up close. The pale pink flower at the bottom of this picture is an invasive filaree (Erodium botrys).

There were also dwarf golden poppies (Eschscholzia caespitosa) mixed in with the lupine and goldfields. The dwarf poppies are a different species than the familiar California golden poppies (Eschscholzia californica). They look almost the same, but only half as big.

Here's a closeup of the dwarf poppies, with more lupine and goldfields - oh, and in the first picture, also a tiny red maid if you look closely (reddish purple, at the far right, halfway down: Calandrinia ciliata). They're all native annuals.

Here are some more red maids.

I wish I knew what the clusters of dull white flowers here are, among the goldfields and red maids.

We explored the edges of the north table.

Blue elderberry bushes grew out over the edge.

We found a sort of vernal pool - a shallow basin where water collects in winter and spring but evaporates by summer or fall. Table Mountain is one of fewer than a dozen places in California that contain "northern basalt flow vernal pools," which support a rare plant community found nowhere else. The Department of Fish and Game purchased more than 3,300 acres on Table Mountain in the 1990s for the purpose of protecting the rare plants in the vernal pools. However, I sadly failed to find any vernal pool species in this particular vernal pool, which was so solidly lined with rocks, and so distinctly divided from the dry land, that it didn't seem very conducive to supporting the usual concentric rings of annual wildflowers that vernal pools are known for. Anyway, the dogs waded right in and did their part to dry out the vernal pool for the summer. I hope they didn't drink up any endangered species!

Here is Susan with the dogs. Both dogs started grazing on plants a little bit around here. When Boston was in the act of chomping down on a plant, I exclaimed "Boston!" in a tone of such horror that she immediately let go of the plant and left it undamaged - at which point I saw that it was just an invasive geranium (Geranium molle), and I wished I had let her eat it. And hey, research shows that moderate grazing by cattle and similar animals favors native species and helps kill off invasive plants.

Here's more sky lupine.

And a native clover. A few years ago, a new clover was discovered that grows nowhere in the world except on Table Mountain: Jim's clover (Trifolium jokerstii), named to commemorate a botanist who studied Table mountain extensively. The clover pictured, however, is not that endangered clover. I think this is cowbag clover (Trifolium depauperatum).

Here's a different species of native clover - I think this one is whitetip clover (Trifolium variegatum) - with what I think is a seep monkeyflower (the yellow one: Mimulus guttatus).

These yellow flowers are the native annual "butter and eggs" (Triphysaria eriantha). It's related to Indian paintbrush.

I can't identify these pink flowers that were growing amid the goldfields.

Here are some native perennials for a change - blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) - with the annual red maids and goldfields. These were growing in the parking lot, which is why there's broken glass on the ground.

We got back into Susan's truck and continued down the road a very short distance, then stopped off briefly to look at these new species: orange fiddlenecks (Amsinckia menziesii), white popcorn flowers (Plagiobothrys), and more sky lupine (Lupinus nanus).

Then Boston and I got back in the truck - Susan and Taco hadn't gotten out of it this time - and we continued down the road until we saw a cemetery. "Your dad likes pioneer cemeteries!" said Susan. "We should stop here for your dad." And she pulled into it.

"Uh, okay," I said. This stop may have had something to do with the fact that Susan likes pioneer cemeteries too.

Anyway, we got out of the truck. Susan pointed to the first gravestone we saw, which bore only the initials H. D. "Who's H. D.?" she asked.

"The poet," I answered. "Hilda Doolittle." Poor H. D.'s grave is being taken over by invasive periwinkle (Vinca major) though, as you can see.

Then I turned around, and the second gravestone I saw was . . . "Look, and over there is another poet, William C. Williams!"

"Wow," exclaimed Susan. "All this time I thought he lived on the east coast."

"Well, here's William James," I said a minute later. He lived on the east coast too. But they were all buried right here!

Susan found E. B., so we decided the engraver had omitted "White" underneath the initials.

Applegate's paintbrush (Castilleja applegatei) was growing around the gravestones.

Along with more goldfields.

I really like paintbrush. I bought some seeds of it once, but never got any plants from it. I need to try again.

And then we went home.

Animals!

2009-03-23T03:54:41Z

We have animals! Lots and lots of new animals. Today I went to the pet store and bought two tiny, unbelievably adorable mice. I named the brown and white one Cookie, because she's the same colors as a dog I had when I was a kid, that I named Cookie because she was the same colors as a cookie. Susan named the mostly white one with a small grey spot at the base of its tail Pat, because she knows a lesbian couple named Pat and Cookie. (Both the mice are female.)

The mice are living in the same cage that our recently deceased hamster used to live in. The cage never had a lid before, though. Over the past few days, I built a lid from wood, nails, wood glue, and wire mesh. This project has caused Susan to exclaim over how butch I am, but it's had the opposite effect on me; I feel less competent with construction tools now than I did before I attempted this. I mean, it turned out more or less okay, but I was far too aware of how many times I very nearly slipped and sawed my fingers half off.

Also, yesterday our neighbors across the street gave us a huge fish and the huge fish tank it lives in. They said she was an Oscar, but we think she's a Red Devil. We put the three largest of our convict fish (one male and two females) in the tank with it. They're too mean to share a tank with anything their own size, but they look too big for the Red Devil to easily eat them. They were born here a year ago, and they've grown so much that they were severely overcrowding their old tank.

We also put in our largest plecostomus from one of the smaller tanks. The neighbors gave us some tank decorations for the smaller fish to hide in, but no pebbles for the bottom of the tank. I bought and added some pebbles later, but I took this picture while the tank was still pebble-less.

I bought a new, smaller plecostomus for the smaller tank, and six neon tetras for that same smaller tank. Those new fish will be cohabiting with two dwarf gouramis and a kuhli loach. There's also a second small tank with cichlids in it, including three smaller convict fish that we'll probably eventually move into the Red Devil's tank, after they're bigger.

Meanwhile, I've moved Stardust's cat tree next to the sliding-glass door, where she was already spending a lot of her time watching bugs and birds outside, to encourage her to spend even more time there. Susan and I are usually on the couch in the living room, with the dogs, and Stardust doesn't venture into the living room all that often because she's still a bit wary of the dogs. But now she's at least within sight of us whenever she's on the cat tree. And now she can look down from her perch at the Red Devil's fish tank, too!

And she can watch from a safe height when the dogs play tug-of-war.

Quote from Susan Cheever

2009-03-19T23:09:39Z

Susan just read this out loud to me, and we are both delighted by it:

As a parent, [John Cheever] could be loving and companionable but was also sharply sarcastic and, in what he confided to his children, merciless. With the two oldest, Susan and Benjamin, he made no secret of his disappointments. Susan, who resembled him in her compulsions, wild streak, and intelligence, was overweight in spite of both parents' relentless nagging; she told Bailey, "In many ways I was a tremendous disappointment to them, I'm proud to say, and hope I've continued to be, since what they wanted me to be is pretty empty."
—John Updike, "Basically Decent: A big biography of John Cheever" (review of Blake Bailey's John Cheever: A Life), The New Yorker, March 9, 2009

My First Bloom Day

2009-03-15T06:19:10Z

On the 15th of every month, garden bloggers everywhere participate in "Bloom Day" by posting photographs of whatever is blooming in their yard that day, and then they all link to their posts from a central location in the May Dreams Gardens blog. I've never been able to participate in Bloom Day before, because I've never had anything blooming. This time I do, although it's still no comparison to anybody else's. I have two intentionally planted plants blooming, and two . . . well . . . weeds. But the kind of weeds I'm not going to pull out.

The golden currant (Ribes aureum) that bloomed first has now fully opened its four flower clusters. Not bad for a one-gallon plant I just bought last November.

Across the back yard from it, my native wood strawberry (Fragaria vesca 'Golden Alexandra') has been blooming ever since I bought it last November. I'm impressed by how well this plant has survived being planted in what turned out to be a seasonal swamp. Its lower leaves were underwater for months, but it's emerged not much the worse for wear at all.

Directly below the currant, there's a weed that hitchhiked into the yard in the currant's pot, from the native plant nursery. It started blooming (with very tiny white flowers - too small for my camera to capture good images of, hence the blurriness in the photograph below) about one day after the currant did. I've now identified it as a bittercress, probably Cardamine oligosperma. If I'm right about which bittercress it is, then it's native. There are some non-native bittercresses that grow in other nearby counties, but if Calflora.org is to be trusted, there are no non-native bittercresses here or in the county where the native plant nursery I went to is located. Bittercresses are still weedy, no matter whether they're native or not, but I've decided to let it live and hope its weedy tendencies help it to kill off some of the non-native weeds.

Also in the back yard, a volunteer that I had thought was clover, and intentionally allowed to live in hopes it would improve the soil, has suddenly bloomed with bright yellow flowers this week. They're not clover-like flowers at all, but clusters of tiny pea-shaped flowers. I've now identified it as a medic (Medicago orbicularis) - a non-native cousin of clover, which still might improve the soil. I'll probably let it grow, because if I removed it, the non-native annual bluegrass would fill in the spot in no time. The medic has been much less of a pest than the bluegrass.

I'm disappointed that my redbud tree doesn't seem to be planning to bloom this year - it's developing tiny leaves, but no flower buds, so maybe it's still too young to flower this year. I'm also disappointed that my California golden poppies still haven't flowered. Half my poppies have turned yellow and died from the various stresses they were subjected to this winter - being flooded and choked out by annual bluegrass, mostly - but the other half are alive and quite large, just not flowering. Other people's poppies have been flowering all over town since late January. Why not mine?

I do hope to be able to participate in future Bloom Days without having weeds comprise half of my blooms. But for a first try, this will do.

Garden

2009-03-07T01:29:41Z

I invented a new weeding technique this week. All winter I've been pulling annual bluegrass and trying to leave it roots-up on the ground to serve as mulch, but the pulled clumps often seem to go right on growing, with just the amount of dirt in their uprooted clods. Worse, the weight of the dirt makes the roots heavier than the tops, such that the pulled clods sometimes manage to right themselves and essentially replant themselves. So this week I stopped using them as mulch, and instead piled them all atop each other and spread a thin layer of mud on top to make berms. Then I planted my newest batch of plants in these berms, to keep their roots up above the flood zone and thereby hopefully prevent them from drowning.

The ground is completely sopping wet out there, both because of the huge rainstorms we had all through February and because our next-door neighbors apparently accidentally left a hose running in their back yard for days and days on end. And the first rule of gardening in clay soil is that one must never, ever dig when the soil is wet, because this compacts the microscopic clay particles and makes the drainage worse than ever. But I completely disregarded this rule, because I had plants to put in the ground and I really wanted to get on with it. We'll see whether I end up paying for this later. So far I think it's worked just fine, because the pockets of air in the bluegrass seem to have oxygenated the thin layer of clay on top, turning the clay in my berms a distinctly redder tint than the clay in the rest of the yard, and making me think that the plants on the berms will have much better drainage than they otherwise would have. But again, we'll see.

Here's one of my new plants on a muddy bluegrass berm: hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea). It's native to the coast from the Bay Area southward, and should develop hot pink flowers if it survives long enough. Isn't the mud disgusting, though? You can't imagine how badly Boston manages to cover herself in mud when the yard is like this.

This one is my favorite plant in my entire garden: silver bush lupine (Lupinus albifrons). It's native right here - it can often be seen next to local highways - and should cover itself with purple flowers soon. I bought two in January; one died within a week or two, while this one has doubled in size in no time at all. I bought another one in March and planted it this week, to replace the dead one. If they both live, I might be tempted to buy more and fill the whole yard with them.

The next picture shows three plants: a mariposa lily (Calochortus superbus) wedged between the two rocks, a soap lily (Chlorogalum pomeridianum) at bottom left, and a sickly California golden poppy (Eschscholzia californica) to the right. I planted the mariposa lily in January and the soap lily in March; I grew the golden poppy from seed, but some combination of annual bluegrass and flooding has just about killed it. All three are native right here. They should bloom in weird colors, white, and orange, respectively.

I also bought a new blue flax (Linum lewisii), though I didn't get a good picture of it. It's native slightly east of here, at just over 1000 feet above sea level. (We're in the Sacramento Valley, very close to sea level.) It should grow blue flowers if I can make it happy.

This next plant is Fort Miller fairyfan (Clarkia williamsonii), a pink- and purple-flowering annual that sprouted from seed I scattered last fall.

Meanwhile, I've been growing these red larkspur (Delphinium cardinale) in a pot - and in many other pots as well. This week, I finally transplanted one pot into the front porch flower bed. They're native on the coast from the Bay Area south. If I get lucky, someday they'll be five feet tall and covered with red flowers.

Meanwhile, I have a few completely non-native plants, too. I didn't plant any potatoes this year, but a few returned from last year.

And I have no idea where this carrot volunteered from, but I've been allowing it to grow, and it's been happily growing. It might even be the native carrot, but it could also be an escaped European carrot from a grocery store. Eventually I'll pull it up and eat it, and if it's orange I'll conclude that it spread from someone's vegetable garden; if it's some other color I might venture a guess that it's native. Not that I'd know for sure; I'm just playing the odds, because I don't know how to tell the difference really.

My Garden's First Flowers!

2009-03-03T03:36:36Z

My garden has produced its first flowers ever! Some of my plants did have flowers on them when I first bought them, and it's possible they grew additional flowers after I put them in the yard, but it's also possible they didn't. Today, though, for the first time, I found flowers in my garden that definitely were not already there at the nursery. My golden currant (Ribes aureum) that I bought last November is blooming for the first time, in the back yard.

None of my other plants are blooming yet, though. There are California golden poppies blooming in other people's yards all over town, but I have a back yard full of non-blooming California golden poppies. I haven't even seen any buds. There are also various trees blooming all over town, but my redbud tree doesn't have a single bud.

Still, I have currant flowers! I can't be a total failure at gardening, because I managed to make at least one plant happy enough that it's producing flowers.