Succulent Border, Berkeley Hills

California’s Mediterranean climate favors succulents and other drought-tolerant plants.  Though most associate cacti and succulents with a stark, desert-like landscape, they can also be used to create lush, rich perennial borders.

In this Berkeley succulent border, small fan palms and mid-sized agaves lend structure, while the low-growing succulent Echeveria secunda clauca takes the place of traditional bedding plants, creating a graphic “carpet” pattern.

Smaller aloes and agaves, with their spiky, hard-edged profiles, provide a counterpoint to the Echeveria’s soft, blousey outlines.  Grasses and fine-leaved plants (like thyme) add an additional layer of texture.  Pea gravel, rather than river rock, gives the scene a distinct “desert” flavor.

It Came From Outer Space…

Romanesco Broccoli, from Riverdog Farm

This odd-looking plant has been making regular appearances in our CSA box.  A member of the Brassica family, romanesco broccoli, like broccoli and cauliflower, is just another manifestation of the mutable species Brassica oleracea.

The word “broccoli” derives from the Latin word “brachium,” meaning “arm” or “branch.”  Broccoli’s provenance is not easy to trace, but most food historians agree that broccoli–or a brassica resembling broccoli–first appeared in Roman literature around the 6th century BC.  Pliny the Elder mentions “cymae” (or “cabbage sprouts”) in his Natural History (Book XIX, Ch. 41). Some food writers interpret “cymae” as an ancient form of sprouting broccoli, while others speculate that Pliny’s “cymae” are either small cabbage plants, or something similar to cima di rapa (or rapini).  Brassica oleracea, as we know it, almost certainly originated in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. We find references to broccoli in early American literature, but the vegetable skyrocketed in popularity in the 1920s, when industrial agricultural techniques, combined with refrigerated train cars, made it possible to reliably transport fresh vegetables from California across the continent. Food historians credit the D’Arrigo brothers with establishing the first commercial broccoli fields in 1922, on a tract of land just south of San Jose.

Speckled Black or Clouded Salamander?

Found this little guy lurking underneath a fescue plant.  After searching a few online herpetology resources (www.californiaherps.com and amphibiaweb.org), we decided that our salamander most closely resembles the speckled black salamander, or Aneides flavipunctatus, though it also looks a little bit like Aneides ferreus, the clouded salamander.

Future Butterfly or Moth?

I posted this image on BugGuide.net (link to my ID request).  Help me identify this pupa!  I found it in my front yard, in the bare dirt beneath a clump of Idaho fescue.  Our garden is located in west Contra Costa county, California.

Will it turn into a butterfly or moth?

Kachoga: Birds & Flowers

Photographed from my kitchen window, in August or September of 2009.  For a few weeks, a flock of tiny birds took up residence in our yard.  Our side yard is full of weedy fennel (and unfortunately, not the edible fennel, either). The birds flocked to the fennel, eating seeds and insects.  Can anyone help me identify these birds?

Object Lesson : As Seen in Vogue

On October 4, 2009, Condé Nast closed Gourmet magazine. Gourmet’s closure shocked the media and publishing worlds. The 68-year-old magazine had been a marquee name for the publishing house, and still maintained a healthy (though not phenomenal) subscriber base (at the time of its closure, Gourmet had about 900,000 subscribers). Founded in 1940, on the premise that “gourmet” cooking could be available to all, Gourmet took American readers on armchair travels around the world.

Gourmet is only one of many, many magazines receiving the axe this year, as difficult financial circumstances and changing media consumption habits force a sea change upon the publishing industry.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that 2009 is one of “the bleakest” years for journalism since Pew began producing these annual reports in 2003. (Read the report here: The Pew Research Center’s 2009 State of the Media Report)

Much has already been written on the impact, on journalism, journalists, funding models, and “how news organizations would ensure quality and reliability.” Nothing, it seems, remains untouched. Even our habits—of reading, of knowing, of criticism and reflection—are transformed.

This piece is not, strictly speaking, about journalists or the journalism. I am not preoccupied, here, with the content, only the form: the physical object itself, the glossy, 8.5 x 11 magazine that hits my mailbox once a month, twelve times a year, and the sensual experience that accompanies that object.

* * *

A fresh copy of Vogue has arrived. I am twelve, almost thirteen, and the magazine’s arrival thrills me. I suppose other girls fell for boy bands. I fell for the cultured, sophisticated world depicted in the glossies.

The pages are glossy, heavy, and smooth to the touch. If I get in closer, and press my nose against the paper, I catch the ink’s metallic, slightly acrid scent.

In those first heady moments, when the paper is still fresh and the binding still uncracked, one can disappear into magazine completely. Forget the Dairy Queen, the corner drugstore, the mall with its three department stores and innumerable “country living” stores with scented potpourri and Hallmark Christmas ornaments. We’ve switched frames, to a world where princesses dine with countesses, and meals feature fabulous French concoctions on fine china.

* * *

Book Review – Classic Alpine Literature : Land Above the Trees, A Guide to American Alpine Tundra

A mountain is a vertical world. As we move upwards, we travel through layered ecosystems. In the Sierras, we pass through open sagebrush desert (on the dry East side) or rolling grasslands (on the wetter Pacific side), then chaparral, then forest (pine, occasionally mixed with oak), high montane meadows (often wet with mountain streams), until finally we break through the timberline and enter a strange but beautiful land.

Washed by intense sunlight and scoured by strong winds, these high alpine landscapes are a study in contrasts. Delicate, jewel-like plants blossom beneath an endless sky. Miniature columbines and gentians grow amidst massive stone peaks.

I fell in love with these alpine landscapes while still in graduate school. Those long summer breaks seemed designed for long trips to the mountains, and I spent as much time as I could outside, above timberline. This became our summer pattern — to alternate days of hiking or climbing in the high Sierra with lazy days lounging with my papers and notebooks. On one of these rest days, I picked up a copy of Anne Zwinger and Beatrice Willard’s classic Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra. First published in 1972, Zwinger’s book remains a classic in the field, presenting a lucid overview of North American alpine ecosystems.

In their preface to the 1996 edition of Land Above the Trees, Zwinger and Willard note that in 1972, theirs was the only book describing North American alpine regions. Today, Land Above the Trees is no longer situated on ecology’s cutting edge, but it is still a model of descriptive natural history. Zwinger and Willard give the reader precise, lyric images of alpine ecosystems. Zwinger’s delicate line drawings are extremely useful, giving form to unfamiliar flora and fauna.

Object Lesson: Hybrid Tea Roses

The “first” Hybrid Tea Rose ‘La France,’ Bred by Jean-Baptiste Guillot in 1867

Hybrid tea roses are the queens of the garden. Tall, elegant, demanding, hybrid teas require lavish attention and plenty of breathing room. Never crowd hybrid teas. Give each rosebush its own radius, and it will expand and grow, sometimes to six feet or more in height, and offer flush after flush of elegant blooms.

Neglect a hybrid tea, and you are certain to be disappointed. Your rosebush will grow scraggly and leggy. It will refuse to bloom. It will grow interlocked branches that catch against each other, it will develop diseases, die down to the graft union. You may find yourself left with just the dog rose rootstock.

Lavish attention on a hybrid tea, and you will be rewarded with constant blossoms. These are the “long-stemmed roses” of the florist’s trade. At their best, they offer elegant, tapered buds that open into silky blossoms.

My neighbor, a gifted gardener, has banned roses–hybrid teas or not–from her garden. They demand too much.

And they do. Roses demand constant care: deadheading, pruning, removing sick or crossing limbs. They want you to watch them for aphids, to train their growth into the desired “open vase” form, to water them only in the morning and never let moisture settle on their leaves.

But. I can’t imagine my garden without roses. I love their voluptuous flowers, their fragrance, and their free-flowering quality. Planted in a suitably sunny site, and lavished with care, a rose will bloom again and again, from the last frost to the first.

Vertigo

My flight was scheduled to leave Taipei at 7:30 pm on August 7, 2009.  Two days before my flight, the skies clouded over, and rain began to fall, a steady drizzle that built into a real storm.  Satellite photographs indicated that a typhoon was on its way.

I had never flown through a typhoon before.  This would be my first time.

I do not recommend flying in a typhoon.

The first rains were welcome, breaking a long summer drought.  They named the typhoon “Morakot,” Thai for “emerald.”  Emerald waters for an emerald island.

I watched the typhoon idly at first, plotting its course along with the meteorologists from the Central Weather Bureau, curious if the airline would delay or cancel my flight.  Then, someone noticed that Morakot was scheduled to arrive on August 7, on the 50th anniversary of the 8/7 floods that devastated Taiwan in 1959.  A curious coincidence.

I am not, generally speaking, a superstitious person. But I pay attention to signs. And there were a few signs that seemed especially portentous: the 50th anniversary of the 8/7 floods, the fact that Taiwan had been dogged by a prolonged drought just before Morakot’s scheduled arrival (generating ideal conditions for mudslides and flooding), and the unusually heavy and steady rains that preceded Morakot. A typhoon, too, had trigged the 8/7 floods that swept away most of my grandparents’ worldly possessions in 1959. Like the typhoon that preceded it, Morakot seemed to bear an unusual quantity of moisture.

I began to pay attention.

Dinners for Hot Nights: Green Beans Stir-Fried with Pork

When I was in Taipei this August, my grandmother taught me the recipe for this version of stir-fried green beans.  This dish is somewhat similar to the popular “dry-fried green beans,” but delivers a completely different set of flavors.  This dish combines sugar and salt with just a hint of heat.  The soy sauce draws out the pork’s sweetness, and the pork accentuates the beans’ fresh, green flavor.

Perfect for a hot summer night, and fast enough for a weeknight dinner.

Ingredients:

• At least 1 lb of Green Beans or Yard-Long Beans (sometimes called “long beans”)
• Red chile peppers or red chili pepper flakes
• Garlic
• A dash of soy sauce (dark soy sauce)
• Thai basil
• 1/4 lb of ground pork or diced pork belly
• Dark brown sugar

Beans: You can use either regular green beans, or yard-long beans. If you choose to use regular green beans, blanch them first.  The green beans should still be crisp when you remove them from the water.  Long beans are much more tender, and don’t require blanching

Chiles: Depending on the level of heat that you desire, you can use fresh red Thai chiles (Thai Dragons or something similar), dried chile pepper flakes, or dried red chiles.  My grandmother prefers fresh red Thai chiles.  Note that in Taiwan, the fresh red chiles tend to be sweet and tender, with just a hint of heat.  The Thai chiles commonly available in the U.S. are much hotter.  If you’re not a fan of heat, do not slice the chiles.  Use them whole.