Every red osier dogwood is a placenta. It streams with blood into the sky … … or it catches the sky, and brings it to you. Traditionally in this country it was […]
Placenta of The Earth
Colourful Spring in the North Okanagan
The wet season is at its peak! Who needs wildflowers when we have leaves, eh.
Spring Wild Harvest Begins!
Sure, the snow was here two days ago, but, pshaw. It’s salad time. Some desert parsley, maybe? Or some balsam root shoots, when they’re tender and sweet, before they get their throat lozenge […]
Winter, You are So Over
I just thought you ought to know.The sagebrush buttercups are here. Snow, you scare no one no more. Not the prickly pears. Not the moss. Not the grass. The sun is back.
Water Sprouts
Beurre D’Anjou Pear Tree in Healing Mode In pre-scientific knowledge, these vertical shoots, the result of aggressive and wrong-headed pruning, are known as “water sprouts”. The old knowledge says it well. The […]
The Bounty of Water in a Dry Country
This is water. It is called Okanagan Lake. In Icelandic, where indigenous European language survives, it is a vatn, specifically a space of free water. Of that, it is a special form, […]
The Okanagan’s Missing Water
Here it is. Blue Bunch Wheatgrass This 10-year-old re-seeded slope shows the likely historical condition of the valley under Syilx stewardship. This grass is very much alive. The valley hasn’t looked like […]
The People of the Grass
Just look at this Great Basin Giant Wild Rye in the late November sun. It’s growing up the hill from my house, in land set aside for new houses. Actually, it was […]
The (Post) Colonial Landscape
These plants have gone wild from a garden above them. Not one is native here. They are native to Eastern North America. To survive in its illusion of seasons, White culture requires […]
Bear Going Nowhere
Two years ago, a mama bear taught her cub how to find grubs at Big Bar Lake, by knocking the cap off this old tree carcass. This year, as a two-year-old kicked […]
Okanagan Okanogan 