Insect Art

About the artists:

Adult leaf miners can be moths, beetles, or flies, and the tunnelling patterns of their larvae vary depending on the nature of the insect. For example, an aspen serpentine leaf miner creates winding or meandering tunnels whereas a birch leaf miner creates large blotches. Serpentine miners are also known to attack herbaceous perennials such as columbine. For most deciduous ornamentals, leaf mining has a negative effect on appearance rather than on plant health. However, leaf miners also attack an array of vegetable crops and can have a detrimental effect on yield due to defoliation. They are particularly damaging to vegetable crops in which the leaves are consumed such as beet, spinach and Swiss chard.

A little more about the artists - they work in British Columbia.  These pieces are from summer 2014.   (There's some photoshopping of the background, but not the miner's mazes.)

A Lesson In Green

Words from Meditiation on Breath by Arnoldo Garcia

Can you tell we've had rain?  But we're getting a lesson in green. Photos mostly from our back yard, except two from our trip.

Dogs, Long Time Frame, Cloudy Descent - Random SF/LA Shots

There are lots and lots of dogs walking their owners around San Francisco.   Lots of shops have water bowls set out for them and most allow dogs in. 
















The Long Now Foundation was closed as we walked by, but they'll be back in a while.  It's an organization founded by Stewart Brand (of the Whole Earth Catalog) and others.  They're building a ten thousand year clock. 

"The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

Their website has an essay by Steward Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the Long Now founders which says this quote from Dennis Hillis helped start the clock project:

 "When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an

ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

 For me, 1984 was the year we were moving toward.  Then 2001.

We were at the Long Now because we were headed for greens for dinner.  But they were closed for a private party.




I took this shot as we headed back for the car and another place to eat.

 

Talking about about greens, I thought this Plant Exchange idea was worth posting.  Lots of people have too much of one thing in their yards and not enough of other things.  I'd love to see this happen in Anchorage.  Just a spot to bring extra plants and exchange for ones you'd like. 













Our trip to the Bay area was much too brief, but we got to see my son and his wife and other good friends.  And soon we were back over an overcast LA and slipped down through the thin cloud cover. 



They announced we'd be on the ground in 15 minutes.  I thought we were further away than that, and once we got over the opening of Marina del Rey, we wandered around the LA airspace and finally landed in 20 minutes.  But it took another 20 minutes before we got a place to park. 




Here's one last shot I took as we meandered around LA waiting to be cleared to land.  A freeway interchange. (As you can tell, I used the little camera.  We were cutting down on what we carried on this trip and my bigger camera was on the don't take list.)

I found myself trying to trace all the connections from one direction to another.  I see how you can switch from the vertical freeway to the horizontal freeway and go either direction.  But I only see a way to turn right from the horizontal freeway to the vertical one.  There's a little something above the loop on the right and below the one on the left, but I can't figure out what they're for. Maybe they go down to a street below.   My other camera would have made this all much clearer.  (No I don't even know what interchange this was.  You can see park area below, and there was a lake on the upper left.)

Keeping People We Love Nearby Through Plants And Flowers

Most of our indoor plants were originally cuttings from my mom's yard, which is a jungle of many, many different plants that do well in her coastal LA climate.  Every now and then one of the migrants in our house puts on a show.  The Poor Man's Orchid (that's the name I've always known it by, but I think it's some type of bromiliad) is now in the final stages of blooming.  These two pictures show a little bit of the emergence of the flowers over the last two weeks.

The pink spike appears one day when I'm watering and eventually the buds come out, drop, and open.

I'm afraid my photos don't do it justice. 

But having these plants here in Anchorage means I have a part of my mom here with us all the time.  We have other plants from my mother-in-law, who is no longer alive, but the plants, which thrive mean she too is always with us. 

And we have a big mountain ash in front of the house that my son planted when it was barely more than a twig. 

Why I Live Here: Sunday Hike At Bird Ridge On Drizzly Sunday Afternoon

The clouds were low and the windshield wipers were on, and Turnagain Arm is still spectacular. 

Driving south, the mudflats are on the right and the rocky slopes are on the left. 

I knew the Bird Ridge trail went up, but I'd forgotten just how steeply.   We took our time and enjoyed the wet and green vegetation and the views when there was an opening through the trees.

 

very green and shiny devil's club leaves and red berries

The trail

Even though it was wet, it wasn't muddy or slippery. 

The ability to slip out of town and get out into this relatively wild and absolutely magnificent space in half an hour is one of the things that ties me to Anchorage.  Even though we've been here over 35 years, it never gets old, never ceases to amaze.

LA Skeletons, Morning Glories, Gingko, Studebaker, And More

As we walked from the bus stop to my Mom's from the airport, and looked at the huge variation of vegetation, invasive species came to mind.  LA is an invasive species incubator.  I don't know if that's true, but so much grows here.  Of course if they stopped bringing in water from Northern California and the Colorado River, probably most things would just die.  (I looked and it is a big problem.  And animal species too.)

In any case, here some parts of the walk that attracted my camera eye.

Wall of morning glories

Health food store juices

I saw these leaves on this tree and I knew I'd seen them.  I mentioned to J I thought there was a bunch of these on the campus of People's University in Beijing where I taught 3 months about eight years ago.  And she said, "gingko"?  I looked it up when we got home and I'm relatively certain that's what this is.  There's a long description of gingko's at an Ohio State website which discretely says the female tree's fruit can be malodorous.  A forum at Chow is more direct:

the presence of a bunch of old (and quite beautiful to look at) female ginkos kept me from buying a house once, about fifteen years ago, just by the smell) (Boy, can you imagine a backyard full o' ginko and durian?!!!!)

RFGS

By Rich Gould-Saltman on Sep 30, 2004 02:30 PM

The campus where I attended college back east is filled with gingko trees, especially in the quadrangle. At certain times of the year, it was like walking into a sewer. Gingko seemed like a perfect name for a tree that was so "stinko."

By Jack Flash on Sep 30, 2004 03:24 PM

you must be referring to Penn. I went there for undergrad and the smell was horrible from the trees!!

By kelly on Sep 30, 2004 07:37 PM

Yup!

I couldn't resist.  The LA Times Sunday edition endorsed Obama for president. 

From Barry Leppan on the Studebakers Drivers Forum:

According to the Hamilton Spectator, the last Studebaker to be built (a 1966 Cruiser, 283 Chevy V8) came down the assembly line on the morning of March 17th, 1966, in Hamilton, Ontario.

However, some of our local Hamilton Chapter members, who worked there at the time, will tell you it was really produced the previous afternoon, March 16th.

It is most probable that the 16th is correct, and the press release and all the TV, etc. coverage took place the next morning, the 17th!

The placard for the car in the Studebaker National Museum reads March 16th, 1966.

Regardless, it brought to an end 114 years of vehicle manufacture under the Studebaker name.

A post at Cars in Depth by Ronnie Schreiber challenges that:

According to what I’ve read, and this seems to be confirmed in a few places, there’s no question that assembly of CKD Studebakers continued after the shutdown of the Hamilton, ON plant in at least two places, Australia and Israel, as those companies used up their last remaining kits and components. There is some indication that assembly in Israel continued through the end of 1966 and possibly into 1967, which would make them the last Studebakers ever that rolled off the lines.

 He's got some Israeli post cards up as part of his evidence.   In any case, the car above is over 45 years old.  I wonder how it passes the California emissions test.

This appears to be either an unripe persimmon or one that is more yellow than orange.  Or maybe it isn't a persimmon at all.

 

The people in the area around my mom's place go in for Halloween in a big way.  These two life sized skeletons were hanging from a three story house.  There is something more than a little disturbing about this.   I'll do some more Halloween stuff before we get back to Anchorage.  

Borage

 As most leaves turn orange, yellow, and red, the borage flower is still out and its leaves are green.



From Botanical.com:

 "The whole plant is rough with white, stiff, prickly hairs. The round stems, about 1 1/2 feet high, are branched, hollow and succulent; the leaves alternate, large, wrinkled, deep green, oval and pointed, 3

inches long or more, and about 1 1/2 inch broad, the lower ones stalked, with stiff, one celled hairs on the upper surfaces and on the veins below, the margins entire, but wavy. The flowers, which terminate the cells, are bright blue and star-shaped, distinguished from those of every plant in this order by their prominent black anthers, which form a cone in the centre and have been described as their beauty spot. The fruit consists of four brownish-black nutlets.

 From Honest Food

"Even the question is a little ridiculous: What do you do with too much borage? Most people barely even know that borage exists, let alone that a) it is edible and b) what you might do to highlight its flavor. Borage arrived in my garden five years ago when I planted it not to eat, but as a bee attractant: The more bees in your garden, the better they pollinate its other plants.
Once you plant borage, you have it forever. It so readily seeds itself I get volunteers sprouting all year long; sometimes those seedlings get, well, a little aggressive."

Hot? Take A Video Break At Ptarmigan Creek, Alaska

Last Tuesday we hiked up along Ptarmigan Creek to Ptarmigan Lake.   It was as beautiful as ever.  We saw some patches of blue in the sky.  The temperature was in the high 60's or low 70's.


Above is the lake at the end of the hike up.  (Actually the trail goes to the other end of the lake, but we stopped here.)

Here's some video of the creek at a point where the water rushes over some rocks.



 Here's another view of the creek.

The beginning of the trail has been made a bit too civilized for me.  









But it soon was back to the old trail.   

Although this is Ptarmigan Creek, we saw no ptarmigan.  But we did see a couple of spruce grouse hens with chicks.

We heard the flutter of wings as the chicks with this hen flew up to the tree.  Then the mother led us along the trail away from the chicks in the tree.  She'd stop to make sure I was following her, then she'd rush further down the path until she suddenly flew up into a tree.

The chicks.

At one point there was a cut off and this sign on a nearby tree.  Yes, the trail is Ptarmigan Creek Trail, but since the creek is below and you have to climb up to get to the lake, it's understandable that people might think this was the point.  It's good that someone added to the sign.   

Here the trail has  split from the creek and goes up along the side of the mountain and the trail gets even iffier here and there.  Here you can see brush crowding the trail with one of the peaks around the lake ahead coming into view. 

 

The trail was a bit overgrown.  We made a lot of noise to alert any nearby bears as we pushed through the cow parsnip to open the trail.  I don't know if any bears heard us, but we didn't see them.

There were lots of blue berries to eat along the way.

Spring Showing and a Bit of Nutcracker Keep Me From Reading

I've got 100 pages targeted for each of the next three days to get this book finished by Monday night's book club.  So I'm going to minimize my time here.  You can see by the bookmark, I'm only halfway through.  It's great reading.  I just have to keep away from this computer.

Meanwhile the birch buds are showing.





And the daffodils are coming up.

I'm not sure what this is.  Something new I got last year.  But it shows you the struggle I'm having with my camera's automatic focus.  Usually I can figure a way to trick it into getting what I want sharp, but it sure liked the background leaves better than the bud, and no matter what I did, it wouldn't yield.









And finally a little music from Yeonhee Freeman's music students who put on a recital today.  What a delightful interlude.  This is one of our honorary nieces in the red dress.

Just a Cactus? It's More Complicated. And Beautiful

A cactus is just a cactus to most people I suspect. But at Palm Springs' Moorten Botanical Garden
it's clear there's an amazing diversity of cacti and succulents.  Though altogether, there aren't that many different species. 

Green Nature says:

They are the largest family of succulent plants, with most of the 2000 known species native to North, Central and South America. The vast majority of cacti, but not all, are well adapted to desert conditions, using their stems to store water during extended dry seasons.
Cacti are flowering plants that serve an important role in their ecosystem by providing food and shelter to many animals, birds and reptiles. Desert tortoises, for example, often snack on their local cactus stems and fruits.