We love you, stag horn sumac. But we love you, smooth sumac more. Oh, Staghorn, you come from Virginia. You knew Hiawatha in your youth. But smooth sumac, daughter […]
It’s Mango Time!
Photography and Human Survival
Pretty sumac leaves, huh. Look again below. Culturally, in Canada, people have the right to cut sumacs down like this and stack them up beside the street so they look like this the […]
I Love Sumac
That’s just the way it is. What’s not to love with music like this? Autumn: Sumac Time When you see that colour bleeding up the scree slopes until it brushes the snow, […]
Ethnobotanical Knowledge: The Language of Science Part 2
Remember? Yesterday I pointed out that each of the plants below, although far apart in botanical class-action, share the power of redness, which arises at different points on each plant, stem, leaf and […]
Red and Not Dead
Are sumac drupes cast into snow by birds random? No. Are rowan berries random? No. Are yellow dock seeds cast onto the snow by wind random? Are the scales of the bark […]
Fooling Around With the Seasons or Plant Sex 101
It’s October 20th… that’s Autumn, right? Best to ask the sumacs. They know. Here are the males, in their finery of feathers. And the females just down the road. Not just plumage, […]
Ten More New Commercial Fruit Crops for the Okanagan
Yesterday, I started putting the practical side of this blog into order. I started with ten new fruit crops that could restart a failing economy unable to retrain its young people, to […]
Birds at Work
Want to get your colour palette right? Follow the birds! They make art, too. Staghorn Sumac Think of it like a paintbrush. And what do the birds make of it? Jackson Pollock, […]
Writing With the Land
Writing literature in the contemporary world is largely about reflecting on, amplifying and extending the traditions of literature. Mostly, these traditions are interpreted as the stories of individual consciousness. Those are all […]
Okanagan Okanogan 