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 […]
Telling Time
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 […]
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 […]
Chikamin Pish
It’s steelhead season. These famed ocean-going trout, the greatest sport fish of the Pacific Northwest, come back every year to spawn. Unlike their cousins, the salmon, they then turn around and go […]
A River Lives On
Wonderful news from Wenatchee, Washington: The proposed Loomis Dam is off. I repeat: the proposed dam on the Similkameen, that would have cost $1 billion to build and flooded the river right […]
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 […]
Okanagan Okanogan 