For November Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, I have three plants blooming, but I'm only going to show you two of them. The one I'm not going to show you is the California aster (Symphyotrichum chilense). I'm not going to show that because I showed it last month when it was at its peak and was the only plant blooming. This month it's begun going to seed and just looks like an inferior version of last month's picture.

The first blooming plant that I will show you you is my new bush mallow (Malacothamnus fremontii). I bought two these over the summer, one of which was in bloom when I received it, but they both died shortly after I planted them. I bought a third one at the end of September, at the fall sale of the California Native Plant Society Redbud Chapter, in Grass Valley. It had buds then, but no flowers. Now it finally has flowers!



( A few more plant photos, with and without flowers )

Susan and I attended the Yuba City Sikh Parade today. Yuba City has less than a seventh the population of Sacramento, but it's the nearest city to where we live that has more 50,000 people in it, so in some sense it's "our" city. Despite being quite a small city, it happens to have one of the largest Sikh populations anywhere outside the Punjab region of India - and the Sikh people here have been celebrating that fact with an annual Sikh parade every year since 1979. The parade, and the all-weekend festival leading up to it, commemorates the Sikhs' receipt of their holy text, the Guru Granth Sahib, in 1708. About 85,000 people attended the festival.

Anyway, we loved it. Susan declared it to be her favorite local festival (of the three we've been to). I think I still somewhat prefer the outlandishness of the Bok Kai Parade, but they both have their advantages - and I say that as someone who doesn't even usually much enjoy one of the major attractions of the Sikh Parade: Punjabi food. It was everywhere, and all of it was free. There was no charge to get in, no charge for the food, no charge for anything at all - and the streets were filled for blocks and blocks with people from Sikh temples all over the state handing out free food. Free food in booths set up by Sikh temples from all over the state, and free food from individuals walking down the street and enthusiastically handing it out. Free food of so many different kinds that even I (a picky eater with an aversion to most Indian food) was able to find plenty to eat. I ended up with two orange sodas, a banana, some apple slices with sauce on them, some orange candy in pretzel-like shapes, some naan I shared with Susan, and several pastries I don't know the names of. Susan ate even more than I did - she ate so much she felt sick from it, and still she wished she could eat even more, because it was all so good.

Entertainment-wise, I preferred the Bok Kai Parade; the Sikh Parade certainly didn't have the amusement value of the bizarre floats in the Bok Kai parade (especially the revisionist history float depicting Donner Party survivors mingling with women in Chinese coolie hats). But whereas the Bok Kai Parade left me feeling that I live in a place full of people with amusing delusions (most notably the mass delusion that there's a thriving Chinese-American community in Marysville, which once did have a thriving Chinese community, but chased all the Chinese people out of town in 1886 and has hardly had any Chinese-American people move back since), the Sikh Parade left me feeling that I live in a place full of inspiringly kind people. It wasn't only the free food, or the enthusiasm with which it was shared; it was also the way neither of us saw a single person drop litter on the ground today, as happens continually at most other public festivals. The ground remained clean, and it seemed as if everyone in sight was a model citizen.



( More pictures of the Sikh Parade )

Look what I carved tonight!




It's to scare Susan's students. (She's a math teacher.) It's supposed to be easy enough that most of them can get it and feel good about themselves as a result, but hard enough that their first reaction will be fear.

So far, though, no students have shown up at the door. We're mostly getting kids too young to recognize long division when they see it, but we got one teenager who said "20" in place of "Trick or treat" and thereby earned an extra piece of candy. And we got one parent who demanded of Susan, "What does that stand for???" in a wary voice like maybe it was a gang symbol or something. (Which, in this neighborhood, may not be as unreasonable an assumption as it seems.)

Edited to add: Just now we got one of Susan's students, who guessed that the answer was 12. Another kid with her agreed that 12 sounded right, and then the mother of one of the kids told them they were right, that 12 was the right answer! Susan decided to politely say nothing. This kid's mother has made our Halloween truly frightening.

Only one of my plants is blooming today, but it's certainly blooming profusely. This is my native California aster (Aster chilensis). Although the flower petals tend to look white in every photograph I take of this plant, they're actually lavender.




I do have other garden photographs to share today, even though I have no other flowers.

( Click to see the non-blooming parts of my garden. )

We decided to go on a one-day camping Friday night with the geology professor we recently took a class from at Lassen, and with some of the other geology students. It wasn't for a class this time, but rather for the college geology club. We brought our dogs. The professor and her husband were bringing their dogs too.

Except we never found them. The professor gave us a sheet of directions that she had printed out from the Reserve America website. We followed the directions and ended up at Black Butte Lake, which was where the professor had said we were going. It looked like this.




We located a group campsite at the place the directions led us to. But it was a weird group campsite. It was huge. It contained a children's playground, a gigantic gazebo-type structure set up for large group meetings to be held under it, a sort of deck or balcony built into the hillside overlooking the reservoir, and enough parking spaces for about 50 cars. Susan estimated that reserving it would have cost the professor about $100. Our group only contained about six people and could easily have made do with two or, at most, three individual sites for $28-$42.

Also, no one was there but us. We waited an hour, but still no one else arrived.

( Continued . . . )

It's finally blooming, or at least a little corner of it is - so I can show you what I couldn't a few days ago. This plant is native to our county and is growing under the faucet in our back yard.

Last weekend we went to Lassen for our geology field trip class. Susan came down with a cold during our stay, and now I think I've caught the cold too. But we still managed to have a good time while we were there. We had both been camping there before, but I hadn't been there since I was about nine or ten years old, and neither of us had seen all the same parts of it before. Also, it was the fourth geology field trip class we've taken with the same professor; we took the first one less than a month after we met, so they've become a sort of romantic tradition for us.

Here I am on a boulder outside the recently built Kohm Yah-Mah-Nee Visitor Center in Lassen Volcanic National Park.



( More pictures )

(Apologies to those of you who already saw this when I posted it on Monday in the wrong place. I'm reposting it now in the place it should have been all along. I took the photographs on Sunday.)

Yesterday, Susan and I took the dogs to Hammon Grove Park. She was feeling guilty about the fact that we'll be going campng without the dogs next weekend for our geology class, so she wanted to give the dogs an outing with us before then. And I hadn't seen the park before, so I was eager to explore it.



( More pictures from Hammon Grove Park )

Not much blooms here in August, not even for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day. Even my native strawberry and Susan's purple alyssum, both of which bloom nearly the entire year long, aren't blooming now. In fact, the only plant I planted myself that is really blooming a lot on this particular morning is my native milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis). I've posted pictures of its flowers before, but the new thing it's just started to produce this month is seeds. Here's a newly opened seedpod with two milkweed beetles crawling on it. (One of them is on the left underside, so you can only see its upside-down silhouette.)



( More )

On Friday I drove to a native plant nursery and bought some new plants. Unfortunately, one of the plants I came home with does not really seem to be a native plant at all. It was labeled as being the native Munro's globemallow (Sphaeralcea munroana), but after I returned home, I started to wonder why all the pictures of this plant on the Internet show it as an upright plant with orange flowers, while my plant and all the others at the nursery are prostrate plants with red flowers and much more deeply lobed leaves than Munro's Globemallow is supposed to have. After reading on Wildscaping.com that some nurseries have incorrectly labeled the South American trailing globemallow (Sphaeralcea philippiana) as Munro's globemallow, I looked at pictures of the trailing globemallow and concluded that my plant is definitely the South American one. I'm planning to contact the nursery about the mistake, although I think I'll have to do this via snail mail, because the nursery's website doesn't give any email address or web-based means of contacting them, and although there is a phone number, the owner is never there and I don't feel confident that his staff (who are probably very overworked) would accurately relay a phone message to him. In the meantime, I think I will give away my South American plant to my father. It's a very pretty plant - still blooming profusely in late July, when most plants here have withered in the heat - but judging from what I saw of it in the nursery's demonstration garden, its prostrate habit makes it look much better in a container than on the ground. Container gardening is a higher-maintenance style of gardening than I feel inclined toward, and even if I were to put it in the ground, I think I would resent it for not being what I had intended to buy. I don't have space in our small yard to grow every pretty plant in the world, and I'd like to reserve what little space I do have for planting actual California native plants.

Anyway, I took pictures of the new plants that I am keeping. Here's a new blue elderberry (Sambucus mexicana), to replace the one that Boston dug up this spring. The new one is bigger than the old one was, which may or may not help it survive longer. (And the bunchgrass in the background is my first deergrass, which has now been there for almost a year. I bought two more of those at the nursery on Friday, so I now have a total of five. At this point, I probably ought to be propagating them from my existing ones instead of buying them. But I haven't successfully managed that yet. I do really like them, though.



( Six more new plants. )

Me: Why does Stardust do that?
Susan: Because she's your cat.
Me: I don't sit in the fireplace.
Susan: Only because you don't fit.
Me: Oh.

Over the course of my lifetime, I've had 14 cats. Stardust is the only one of them who has taken to wandering into the fireplace. She does it rather regularly. Tonight she sat there for about 10 to 15 minutes, looking around and sniffing everything before casually wandering back out again. Are there other cats who behave this way?

Most of my blooms for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day today are the last straggling remnants from plants that had previously bloomed much better, so I don't much feel like photographing them in their current state. My foothill beardtongue had completely stopped blooming for a few weeks, but now it's reblooming with a few more dark blue flowers. Both my sticky monkeyflowers are still producing a few new flowers each, but only on the new growth at the tips of their branches - the flowers all burn away in less than a week. Also, their latest flowers haven't been in their original shades of red; the recent flowers have been in increasingly ugly shades of faded red and sometimes orange. It's as if they're trying to revert to the pastel peach shade of the locally native sticky monkeyflowers, but since my red ones aren't a cultivar, just a naturally occurring red-flowering shade from southern California, I'm not sure why the red color would be so uninclined to stick around. I also have a few lingering narrowleaf milkweed flowers, though the stems have all flopped over horizontally, so the plants as a whole don't look too great. And I have some lingering California golden poppies in bloom, though not nearly the profusion I had in May.

I have two new intentional blooms today - that is, blooms on plants I'm intentionally keeping alive, and that haven't bloomed before. One is sort of cheating, because the plant bloomed the day after I put it in the ground. But at least I've managed to keep it alive so far. (Actually, I bought two, and I think one of them might die. But the one in bloom seems healthy still.) Here it is: my new native bush mallow (Malacothamnus fremontii).



( More plants, some of them with flowers. )

Susan and I spent the weekend at Howard Creek Ranch Inn in Westport - a little tourist town on the California coast, slightly north of Fort Bragg - to celebrate her birthday, slightly belatedly. We were so delighted by the inn that we agreed that we want to come back again (perhaps next summer?) and perhaps stay longer than the two nights we stayed this time. It's a 60-acre property located directly on the ocean, but also containing dense redwood forest, hiking trails, and more things to do than we found time to take full advantage of.



( You can see why we enjoyed it so much! Click here for more. )

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.



( Click for more! )

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).



( More garden pictures )

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.



( One more of Ganymede, and one each of Boston and Stardust )

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.



( More pictures )

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.



( and so on . . . )

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.



( Two more )

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.



( Click to read the rest of this entry . . . there are more flowers! )