Peaches are scrubby little bushes from the Gobi Desert, that live to be fifteen years old, more or less, before they succumb to their many fragilities. Here’s one I’ve been caring for […]
Gardening in the Petro State…Is that Possible?
How do we save the planet? By planting rocks in our gardens to “prevent global warming?” Isn’t that murder? Or by planting rhubarb? The second garden is mine, across the road from […]
Gardening in the Land of Peak Oil
How do we save the planet? By planting rocks in our gardens to “prevent global warming?” Isn’t that murder? Or by planting rhubarb? The second garden is mine, across the road from […]
A Canadian Education
Canada is a big country. Here’s a tiny piece of it in the west. What you’re looking at is a bit of a collision between a volcano and a seabed off the […]
Tragedy in the Spring Snow
Our little herd of nine does had two fawns last year. The coyotes got one last week. This doe is now being very protective. It’s hard, though. Forage is reduced by overgrazing, the […]
Making Humans
On the shores of Kalamalka Lake there is an ancient village. It’s so old it has been forgotten. The people who live there now don’t know that the land that called them, […]
Reviewing David Pitt-Brooke’s Walk Through the Grasslands
I spent the early winter reading a beautiful and, unfortunately, incomplete book: Crossing Home Ground, by David Pitt-Brooke. It records an epic walk through the grasslands of Southern British Columbia: my own […]
The Pacific Northwest is Not the Southwest
Here’s a place. Squeezed in between the United States and Greenland. Canada. Best to stand right-way up. Lately, I’ve heard the strangest thing. I’ve heard that my part of the country… … […]
Against the Descending Night, A Prayer in the Rushes
I am not angry. I am sad. My elders taught me that these were cat tails. They taught me that poetry was a fairy tale. They taught me that these were swamp […]
The Lessons of Red Osier Dogwood
I went looking for light. In a grey world, it was all in the red osier dogwoods, stəktəkcxʷlɬp, the purifier, the beloved of moose. I spent some time with it as it turned […]
Okanagan Okanogan 