Lichen is a colonizer. It eats rock and releases minerals that other plants can use. Most of the lichen on the stone below has died. It’s a good chance to see the […]
If You Lose the Water, You Lose the Land
A Ring Around The Sun
Light travels at 299 792 458 metres per second, and if you can’t see that, don’t worry: you almost can. When cloud is pushed very high by heat, and thins, and spreads out to […]
Where is the Sun? On Earth!
See, here’s the thing about the globe in the sky. You can make it yours, as the Oregon grape does in bloom… … or you can gather it in as the […]
Hope for the Earth: Settler Lessons from the Voles
The bunches grass bunches up. With the help of snow, it mounds. We could call it mound grass. We could call it a village. Note the vole highway in the lower centre […]
How Grassy is Grassland? Very.
The grass that grows in clumps… … make a pattern that the mice and gophers follow under the snow. In this way, they deepen the grid. That the grass makes. In […]
Let the Sun Be Our Guide
The hips of the wild rose are red so that we will see them, pick them, and carry their seeds with us. Other people, like deer and birds, are targeted in the […]
The Grass at Dawn
At sunrise, the bunchgrass shows itself most clearly… … and it’s pink! But look at the sage and the lichens, those pools of pale blue-green algae (well, sort of)… It is […]
Rejoice: The Grass in the Okanagan is in Full Flower
Such healthy bunchgrass this year, in full flower. Glorious!
Bunchgrass: the Trail-maker and Philosopher
I promised some thoughts on ecology today. I’ll post them tomorrow. To keep the intricacy of environment in mind, here’s a photograph of a clump of bunchgrass. Of the millions I have […]
Deer at Work
A stack of criss-cross bones … … goes walking in the weeds, trot, trip, trit, trop. Et voilà! A trail in the shape of their bones. Not just that, but bunchgrass […]
