Category: Plants
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Interview with Ginny Hunt of Seedhunt
Huge gratitude to Ginny Hunt of the wonderful Seedhunt.com, “Seeds of California Native Plants and More”, for being up for answering a few questions via e-mail. Previous articles about her work include “Unusual Seeds For Curious Gardeners” (2004; Archive), “Sowing Wildflowers” (2009; Archive), “Hunting for seeds: Watsonville woman”s website offers hard-to-find natives, salvias, restios” (2018;…
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Geophyte filter in Calscape
I see that it’s been just a little over a year since I heard back about volunteering with Calscape, a little under 11 months since my first commit (“Allow setting calscape server under test via flag”). It’s been a good year working with the Calscape folks and other volunteers, and I hope it’s something I’ll…
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Willow seeds germinated within 6 days
The young one and I planted some willow seeds recently. I was impressed to see yesterday that they had germinated in at most 6 days. (I wasn’t checking them everyday so I’m not sure exactly when they germinated.) It’s thrilling to see these little leaves. I want to say “new life”, but I shouldn’t forget…
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California geophytes
On Reddit, bobtheturd said, “Calscape doesn’t do a good job filtering for geophytes, so wondering which are your favorites. I’m in the Bay Area, so more specifically interested in those.” (The post got some interesting replies.) Calscape describes itself like this: “Calscape is California’s hub for California native plants and native plant gardening, created for…
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Pittosporum tobira
Our neighbor’s Japanese cheesewood (Pittosporum tobira) is blooming, and it smells great, like sweet citrus. I’ve been wanting to learn a little more about the plants around me so I think I’ll start with this one. Some photos: According to Kew’s Plants of the World Online, it’s native to Japan, Korea, Nansei-shoto, Taiwan, and Vietnam.…
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From redwoods to chaparral
A paragraph that caught my attention in John Young’s book Ghost Towns of the Santa Cruz Mountains: Thirty lumber mills operated for seventy years on the eastern slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains above Los Gatos, changing the landscape from a verdant parkland of giant redwoods to dense, chaparral-covered slopes with rocky gullies carved by…
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Failed replication and a germination mystery
In “The Nature of Oaks”, Doug Tallamy suggests an experiment: To be fair to worm catchers, many of the inhabitants of oak leaf litter are barely visible to the naked eye even though they are everywhere you look. But there is an easy way to observe some of the larger arthropods in the litter beneath…
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Murdannia audreyae
I’m thinking of my aunt Audrey again today. In my previous post, I talked about a succulent named for both her and my uncle Bob, Kalanchoe fadeniorum. But she also has a plant named by Bob just for her, another one they discovered together: Murdannia audreyae. You can see a couple photos of it on…
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Kalanchoe fadeniorum
My uncle Bob is a botanist. Tonight he told me one small thing I want to remember. He has multiple plants named for him, but of all those, he said, Kalanchoe fadeniorum holds a special place for him because, unlike the others, it is named for both him and his wife Audrey (Archive). The ones…
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Sprouts
Two sets of sprouts that have popped in recently in our home nursery, representing extremes of germination times: Telegraph weed (Heterotheca grandiflora), sowed October 28 this year; I noticed the first sprouts on November 1, just four days after sowing. The photo below is from November 5th. I saw them blooming on El Monte on…