I love big, splashy plants as much as the next person, but there’s a plant that I’ve got a special attachment to that’s neither big nor splashy. The green rose, Rosa chinensis viridiflora, lives up to its name. When the… Read More »the kindness of strangers
Someone John knew had a big Australian tree fern in a pot in his front entry. The plant got too big and we adopted it. At some point we repotted it into a fairly huge pot, something like two feet… Read More »free at last
A few posts ago I wrote about the garden photography of John Pfahl. Four of the works from this series are in the exhibition, Picturing Eden, at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts. The show runs through January 13, 2008.… Read More »coda: John Pfahl
Here’s a picture of our cat Scooter, squinting: Lovely, eh? She’s definitely great company in the house or when we’re outside gardening. But being a cat, she’ll be around one minute and off doing something else the next, only to… Read More »cats, bulbs, corms and tubers
Desert Center, California lies about halfway between Indio and the Colorado River, halfway between a hot, flat desert town and the Arizona border. Unless you need to stop for gas, you pass by it on I-10 at wide-open highway speeds.… Read More »when landscaping fails
I was at the day job, prepping for a meeting, when John IMs me from home. Do you want me to plant the pansies? Innocent enough question, eh? The day before I’d bought 4 sixpacks of them, little white vanilla… Read More »losing control
In the late 90s I was fortunate to be part of a show of photography at San Francisco Camerawork, entitled Feed, that centered on our relationship with food. One of the artists in the show was one of my photographic… Read More »extreme gardening
There’s an old family photo that I think about every now and then. My sister and I are seated at a viewpoint overlooking the lower falls on the Yellowstone River. My sister is staring into the camera and at my… Read More »and so it begins