Today, Wednesday, October 26, I’ll be using my collection of East German photographs to anchor a talk about the garden at the heart of all modern universities, and the key role that […]
The University and the Garden
A Chain of Islands
Our rocks here aren’t like other rocks. For one thing, like the rocks of most of British Columbia west of the Albertan mountains, it is light, volcanic rock that erupted to form […]
The Price of Wine
Are you enjoying laying down all that cash for a bottle of Okanagan Valley wine, maybe a dry as a rattler’s belly merlot from Nk’mip winery in Osoyoos? This is North America’s first […]
Strike Out!
Ah, sometimes you bite into an apple and get a mouthful of delicious irony. Here, for instance, is a BC Tree Fruits radio spot ad about marketing local apples, presumably from the […]
The Dirt on Dirt
The Okanagan is full of dirt, but most of it didn’t come from here. It was brought by water. Here’s what I mean: Silt bluffs by Penticton At the end of the […]
Wild Harvest
The fruit that this rich land produces is dependent upon mining the water resources that used to flow down from the hills. As a result of the corresponding loss of spawning channels […]
Choke
When I was a boy in the Similkameen, we were told that choke cherries would, well, choke you. Fruit that grew wild on the land was, we were told, poisonous. Sigh. Such words are […]
Golf
Driving and a golf ball around eighteen holes is a complex kind of mathematics. It takes so much time to get around the course, measured in so and so many strokes at […]
Wild Apples
The American natural philosopher Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis in May, 1862. He lived to see the apples bloom that year and begin to swell into fruit, but not to mature […]
Royal Gala Country
Late in September, a forklift driver at a Kelowna apple packing house goes on a hunger strike for publicizing that a truckload of Washington Royal Gala apples was inside his warehouse during Royal […]
Okanagan Okanogan 