Okanagan Lake is home to a monster called Ogopogo. He’s awfully good for tourism. What is he? A sturgeon? A hunk of driftwood? A plesiosaur? Well, maybe not a plesiosaur, not if […]
Ogopogo
Nuclear Fusion With a Twist
I had an idea about the land. It started in the sky and ended on earth. It went like this. First, a tiny introduction. Nuclear fusion is the process of merging two lighter […]
Secret Water and Lost Water
One secret of water is that it flows downhill. Another is that it does not stay. This is true of wetlands, which don’t consume water but use it then pass it on, […]
Political Shenanigans
Who owns the land? Coyotes, I think. Still, issues of human land use remain politically troubled. The area in the midground of this picture, for example, is part of an area of […]
The Living Dead
Halloween is an ancient ritual, played out on October 31, the old New Year’s Eve. In the English version of these ceremonies, which the Canadian Okanagan inherited, children dress up as lost […]
Before the Crush
It is always exciting to taste a new vine as it pours out of the press into an enamel cup. Behind the sweetness, a hint of the wine tantalizes the mouth, like […]
Feral Agriculture
Consider what happens when our plants escape our fences: Feral Grapes Growing Without Water Who says grapes need to be grown in monocultured vineyards, on expensive wires, with bird guns driving the […]
Telling Time
John Keats called this time a year the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” He did so in one of the most beautiful poems in the language. Here in our volcanic rocks […]
The University and the Garden
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 […]
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 […]
Okanagan Okanogan 