I keep collecting plants that can’t survive Portland winters outside. Perhaps I’ll live long enough for the air plants, bromeliads, elephant ears, and stag horn fern to thrive in the yard and on the porch beyond their summer parole. That would be a sliver of joy in the coming chaos and destruction of accelerating climate change. As new […]
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I like to grow things. I like practical solutions. And I like mischief with a purpose. Thus my immediate attraction to two stories about innovative ways to grow fruit. The first: nurseries developing what they call fruit salad trees—trees grafted to bear several different fruits from the same trunk. It’s perfect for our small urban […]
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That stranger the sun came out briefly today, and hundreds of honeybees from our backyard hive streamed out to greet a world festooned with spring blossoms. They seemed to take as much delight as I do when the clouds break and the temperature rises. Of course for them this weather change is like a factory […]
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Nearly a decade ago, a sudden medical problem made me afraid I was going to die on the spot. What had I done to deserve the infamy of croaking in Costco?
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For two weeks the broccoli heads stood like princes of the garden, waiting for a kitchen coronation. The wait was too long. Hordes of aphids stormed the cedar-plank box from which the broccoli grew and blanketed anything green. The heads looked cloaked in a lumpy white soot. Ruined.
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I’m afflicted with vegetable garden envy. Sure, we have many things growing and gracing the dinner table. Way too much lettuce in fact. But our urban bounty has come to harvest slowly because no part of the yard has day-long sun. And there’s one raised bed in which everything seems frozen in time despite the […]
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In February on a rare sunny day, I helped friends dig up and move a Japanese laceleaf maple from their backyard to their front. No chance the tree was going to survive the unavoidable mugging at our hands.
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Maybe aches and pains from transplanting a tree explain why I keep thinking about the Japanese maple. But the real reason, I’m afraid, is irrational emotional attachment for something not even in my yard. The tree belongs to friends in Portland’s Sabin neighborhood. I spent several hours Saturday helping them extricate it from a tight […]
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Even with the onslaught of winter, some flowers refuse to yield to nature. They won’t give in despite the overwhelming forces aligned against them. Yes, I’m granting powers to plants — thinking, free will, emotions — that to our knowledge don’t exist.
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A squirrel is mocking me. We had a peace pact for a few years. But the critter has had an attitude ever since I removed its nest from the eaves above the front porch. Or maybe it’s because I inadvertently dig up nuts the squirrel has socked away around the yard.
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I have this thing for gardening. Just me and plants and dirt. Creative yet mindless. Mixing and matching. Trial and error. Nobody telling me how to do it. My three-year-old son draws better than me, but the yard is a canvas on which I can paint something of merit. I say “I” as if it’s […]
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Every spring I start filling up the front porch with potted plants. The porch extends the width of our 1920s Craftsman house, so there are long wide ledges begging for greenery. The back deck next to the small goldfish pond gets a few plants too. I gravitate toward the tropical and cold-sensitive, mostly begonias because […]
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An autopsy photo? A closeup of an alien’s skin? Or nature in all its bizarre beauty and symmetry? Hint: I captured the image today at Hughes Water Garden south of Portland in Tualatin. Going there is my crack cocaine: the sound of running water and plants everywhere.
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