Somebody read that hawthorns grow wild here. Domestic varieties show up in low-water gardening just about everywhere, with their pretty pink flowers and their red berries for the birds. Full marks for […]
Hawthorns in Danger of Extirpation
Hi-Tech Water
Trees don’t always need much water. Here’s an apple tree that is doing very fine, thank you very much, without irrigation: Apple Tree Standing Like a Horse in a Field Coldstream Ranch […]
Sour Dates
They might be called russian-olives, and they might look and taste like sour, sawdusty olives, but they’re really dates, and they are weeds. They wreck ecosystems, displace native species, reduce environmental diversity, […]
Standing Still
A long time ago, orcharding started in the Okanagan when Lord Aberdeen and Lady Aberdeen planted the Coldstream Ranch with fruit so they could make jam and compete with these folks from the old […]
Making Light of Gravity
Gravity is the point at which the energy of the universe touches the earth. We should be able to use that. Who needs fossil fuels. Here, for example, is the energy that […]
The Garden and the University
Here’s one of the gardens at the University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus, right smack dab in the middle of the grasslands of Ellison, north of Kelowna. Given that the American half […]
Respect
Time is a strange thing. The farther in distance we look into the night sky, the father back in time we are seeing. If we look far enough, we see the beginning […]
Being the Mountain
There’s a thing that happens with sheep in the mountains of Wales and Iceland: they become acclimatized to the mountain, and pass that acclimatization on to following generations. Once they have been […]
Life Raft for the Grasslands
Can you imagine drowning on dry land? It happens. On the grasslands, the difference between breathing and drowning is so slight. For instance, at a height of 860 metres, after a day […]
Black Pine
We’re talking about Pinot Noir. Don’t google it. You’ll get thousands of variations on the title of one book, rather sloppily quoted and never questioned, so let’s just go to the source. […]
Okanagan Okanogan 