Author Archives: gardenriots

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About gardenriots

I'm a horticulturist with 35 years experience primarily in the maintenance and management of public landscapes and gardens, including, renovation, construction, planting design, doing horticultural reviews of capital projects and creating and implementing maintenance plans that recognize the dynamic nature of these places. I have a strong interest in sustainable/ xeric landscapes and view the landscape as an opportunity to create places of beauty in an all too often utilitarian urban world while at the same time using them as a teaching tool for the public and peers. I recently retired from Portland Parks and Recreation where I was responsible for many of our downtown landscapes for 16 years. I have a degree in ornamental horticulture and a life long interest in science, beginning when I was ten or eleven with astronomy. I became fascinated by physics and the paradoxes and conundrums theory left us with in the '60's. I moved on from this to an avid interest in nature, biology and the living world around me in Central Oregon. I did not find a mentor so instead spent many hours by myself exploring and wondering and became largely self-taught, a pattern that has continued through my adulthood. Some of my postings are a direct result of my curiosity and are a result of my learning style, submersing myself in a topic that interests me, generally related to a plant I have grown and then building a fuller understanding of what is going on. Topics as diverse as general evolution to quantum biology and learning the biogeography of regions from which my plants come are continuously fascinating to me. These interests can become consuming 'rabbit holes' for me taking me places my wife does not understand. The world to me is a beautiful, fascinating place filled with puzzles to be understood and thereby more fully appreciated.

On the Danger of Being ‘Normal’ and Exclusive: The ‘Queer’, Diversity and its Essential Nature

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  • I’m a thematic reader, certain topics appeal to me. My tendency is to dive in when they fit into the puzzle that intrigues me, particularly the big one about life; what it means to be alive; what organisms share in terms of their biological function as well as what connects us…all of us, as a species and more broadly across species; the ecology of life, how we fit together, necessarily; how this life would not exist  were we truly individuals, separate, isolated, independent organisms and how we delude ourselves when we insist otherwise. One book often leads me to the next. Sometimes several. So I read about quantum physics and how as we integrate that into biology, it transforms that science, adds an element of ‘magic’ to it. Neurobiology. Ecology. Evolution, The embryogenesis of that single egg cell into the the dividing undifferentiated blastula, to a mature organism with its multiplicity of differentiated cells, unique tissues and specialized organs. Metabolism. Gender and sexuality. Perception and consciousness, its complexity and variety. Relationship, function, communication, internal ‘signaling’ and ‘switching’.  How concepts of sentience and beauty, language and art, the soul, all spring from the complex act of living…. Integral to it. How species and individuals all play roles, simultaneously in every level of ‘community’ in which they belong/participate, indispensable and irreplaceable, all related parts of an ongoing, evolving, process; one that we are so embedded in that we cannot possibly discern the value of anyone ‘member’s’ contribution, each an element in the larger dance, a ‘process’ which itself, is the point. As Shakespeare once wrote in, “As You Like It”:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts….

We do not and cannot know the ending. There is none, or rather each ending marks a beginning, any guess that we might offer of an ultimate purpose, of a goal, remains unknowable, beyond the continuing unfolding of life…endless change.. Progress? It’s difficult to say as the earth system collapses and ‘reboots’ over time. The expression of the whole is observable only in moments, in its parts.

The aphorism, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, begins to get at what it means to be alive, that we all depend on each other, connected, related through the dynamic processes of being, the flow of energy and its ‘in-forming’, the translation of matter and form. We are each a unique expression of this process. If we are ever to fulfill our potential, if we will ever be able to discern what that might be, we must recognize these connections. Our individuality is a selfish story we tell ourselves, one that fires our ambition to differentiate ourselves, to put ourselves ‘above’ others, to claim exceptionalism, and in so doing, lose the larger game playing out before us. As ‘individuals’ we are incomplete, hobbled in our larger social and ecological roles, we devalue ourselves when we fail, individuals rather than the ‘collectives’ that we are. We may act individually, even ‘freely’, but our actions will always be informed by both our past and the actions of all around us. We forever linked across time and space, directly by lines of dependency, recognized or not. We are inevitably part of something much larger than ourselves. We are bonded composites, never truly independent, as both individuals and a species, communities integrated into unique wholes. Even our consciousness is a product of this collective relationship. ‘Shaped’ by and shaping the conditions in which we live. The synapses in our brains, responding and working to shape the world around us and within. We are connected in countless unseen ways, essential and impactful never the less. Continue reading →

The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, a Review

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Global climate change, in our current political climate, has been relegated to a secondary status. There is so much ‘shit’ hitting the fan right now that it gets largely lost in mainstream media coverage. The science that supports it, continues, although at a slower rate. Our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy has slowed along with the republican denials, their actions to ‘deBidenize’ America, cutting funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act, ‘seed’ monies to fund needed infrastructure investment, along with their cuts to the funding of research into the supporting science and technologies. The topic has been rendered into one of ‘belief’ as if its consequences will have no real world effects, a simple argument of the uninformed, like ‘Ford beats Chevy’, pointless and personal. Author Mike Tidwell, an obvious long time ‘believer’ and lobbyist, has worked over the last 30 years to move the political dial toward climate action, amongst his neighbors, his home state of Maryland and Congress. Here, in his recent book, “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue”, he tells his and his neighbor’s story, in his DC area neighborhood, of the real world impacts they’ve observed and are attempting to combat. Amongst his neighbors are  Congressman Jamie Raskin, his friend, Ning, a college prof who has been working tirelessly on getting a novel carbon sequestration program up and running, a local state legislator who has been working to get massive scale wind generators built off shore and others working in smaller ways, dealing with the fall out of a climate already changing around them which, among other things, is causing crazy weather perturbations, changes in rainfall and temperature swings that are leading to things like a large increase in Lyme disease, because the milder winters are killing fewer of the disease carrying ticks, while also leading to the massive die off of mature trees across their neighborhood. Continue reading →

Our Central Problem is Economic

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If you follow the pundits, social and mainstream media, the problem in America would seem be one of a splintered society, one fatally compromised by a mix of peoples that simply cannot be reconciled. The American ‘melting pot’ separated into battling bits, the ‘recipe’ that formerly held it together proven to be a ‘suspension’ of parts that never really belonged together and now, without, enough support, is failing…but is this true? If you go to a more primal, basic, level and ask what do people need, it always begins with survival and how when one’s survival, our security, feels in doubt, when we are confronted with overwhelming threats, fear begins to take us over. We become less nuanced and subject to manipulation, by slick talkers and those who would use us. Truth, becomes malleable as we struggle for something ‘real’, something ‘solid’.  Continue reading →

Holodiscus microphyllus, Rock Spiarea in Dry Canyon

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Another less common slope dweller is Holodiscus microphyllus, or Bush Ocean Spray, a deceiving name, or Rock Spiarea, which is also somewhat confusing. Confusing because Spiarea is the genus name for an entirely different genera of shrubs. So I call it simply Holodiscus. ( Botanical names can be confounding to the uninitiated. I’m not a big user of mnemonics, but I still remember first learning this plant’s close relative, Holodiscus bicolor, and the phrase immediately came to mind, ‘Holy Discus, Batman!” I know, silly, but I doubt I will ever forget that plant.)

This typically occurs on the eastern flank of the Cascades and in the mountains of SE Oregon. The common name, ‘rock’, suggests its preferred sites. I’ve not seen one in Dry Canyon bottomland. It seems most common below the east rim north of the Maple Bridge. Continue reading →

That Gray Stuff? It’s All Sagebrush…Nope

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Part of the Dry Canyon plant series

Everybody knows Juniper and I suspect that a lot of people who think they know Sagebrush, that ubiquitous gray shrub you see everywhere, may be confusing it with other plants, blurring all ‘gray’ shrubs into one. Now this may not seem to be a big deal, but if you are trying to manage a landscape with these in them or trying to create a landscape which reflects the local plant communities, then it becomes much more important that you know what you have so that you can evaluate your landscape’s condition and decide upon what you may need to do, or stop doing, to meet your goals. Continue reading →

The Cut Leaf Thelypody in Dry Canyon

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[Plants of the Dry Canyon Natural Area – This will be the start of a new series focused on the plants of Redmond’s Dry Canyon. I’m creating them to be posted for ‘local’ consumption on the Friends of North Dry Canyon Natural Area. It’s a City Park including about 166 acres at the north end of Dry Canyon Park which the City has identified as a Natural Preserve. The group works as an advocate with the City, on public education and helping with on the ground work projects. I’ll identify each such post here.]

As you walk the trails below the canyon rims you will be seeing these growing scattered and in bunches. This is the Cut Leaf Thelypody, Thelypodium lacinatum. These are common where ever there’s a bit of soil between the rocks on the slopes below the rims growing amongst the tumble of massive basalt. I’ve seen these elsewhere growing in other eastside Oregon canyons with similar conditions.
These are members of the Mustard family, prolific seed producers and quite competitive. Another plant that, at least so far, doesn’t venture out into the canyon’s bottomland.
Elegant when it first starts flowering, like so many native annuals and perennials, these start declining while they proceed through their flowering season detracting from their appearance. What do I mean…each spent flower, begins to form its narrow, linear, Mustard seed capsule, quickly maturing its tiny seed and then drying, twisting and browning, while the inflorescence continues to bloom out towards its terminal end. A little messy, yes, but characteristic of these plants. We humans are relatively intolerant of such decline in our garden plants and so generally refuse them admission. Under the local wild conditions, as dry as they are, species tend to either be early flowering, when soil moisture is still most available or those like this that begin to decline before the show is over. Summer drought is a ‘cruel’ taskmaster. There are exceptions to this rule but….

https://oregonflora.org/taxa/index.php?taxon=8778

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, A Review

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Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, ecologist, a teacher and a member of the Potawatomi people of the Great Lakes region, from whom she learned her people’s particular world view, one once common amongst many indigenous peoples and in stark contrast to that of our present day dominant culture, which has lead us to powerfully shape our our world today. Her three popular books, “Gathering Moss”, “Braiding Sweetgrass” and her latest, “The Serviceberry”, present to the reader a glimpse into the natural world as seen from this ‘alternative’ world view. All three are enlightening reads and not overly technical. They are ‘invitations’ to see the world from a different perspective. The latest is the smallest, a book barely over 100 pages, with large type and in a small page format…a quick read, unless you pause to give what she presents some additional thought. The best, and the one I read first, is “Braiding Sweetgrass”.  Continue reading →

What to Do? What to Do? On the Meaning of One’s Life

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High in the Warner Mountains, Mountain Mahogany edging the near rim, looking across to Hart Mountain.

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about the meaning of life, understanding that the purpose of one’s life, is not a singular question, but one of the whole of it. Far too much time is spent with the concerns of one’s individual life; one’s accumulation of wealth, power, accolades, stuff….We are social animals, members of interwoven human groups, but are far more than that. Each of us are an integral part of ALL of the life around us. At the core of the question is who we are and what we ‘should’ do. Given all of the failures and goings on that bombard us today, all of the ‘takers’, abusers of power, the automatic almost banal destruction of the life around us, the losses accumulate and easily overwhelm us. Our’s today is a world of shrinking possibility. Calamity and catastrophes confront us from every direction. What is one to do? Continue reading →

The Seat of Awareness: On Plants and What We can Learn from Them

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“From the viewpoint of the evolutionary biologist it is reasonable to assume that the sensitive, embodied actions of plants and bacteria are part of the same continuum of perception and action that culminates in our most revered mental attributes. “Mind” may be the result of interacting cells. Mind and body, perceiving and living, are equally self-referring, self-reflexive processes already present in the earliest bacteria.”
—Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, “What is Life?”, 1995

From what do sentience, awareness, consciousness and intelligence come from? Are these capacities a product of an organism’s complexity? At what point does it first appear? is it a property inherent to even the simplest organic chemicals? of peptide chains and amino acids, of atoms themselves?What of the organizing principle that seems to guide embryogenesis, the growth and form of every living individual of every species? Is it in action in the most ‘simple’ interactions between organic chemicals and the energy flowing through them, that favors one form over another and animates those same forms once they meet some critical minimal level of complexity?  Is this evolution towards complexity and ‘awareness’ an inevitability? A product of its component parts and the energies within it? [This is an idea that is separate from the notion of an inevitable ‘progress’ of life, always moving ‘forward’. Progress is a human notion, an assessment and a valuation of the change around us, not a ‘goal’ of natural selection and the animating ‘flux’ of energies within the universe.] Rudimentary awareness must exists at some necessary and basic level in the simplest single celled organisms…even in plants.

I look to that which is shared between all organisms and question the idea of the animal brain, and its neural system, as the basis for these things and its purported absence in plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses and archaea, as lacking in them. The brain itself and associated nervous system is a unique and complex structure present only in ‘higher’ animals. This bias in favor of the brain and neural systems, especially that of the human brain, as the seat of awareness and consciousness, ignores the requirements of any organism. We are biased in our insistence that these capacities must be located in a singular physical organ and no other. A singular occurrence in the universe. A huge conceit on our part, that this capacity exists in us alone, in and organ and tissues we could could physically evaluate, one which we ‘carry’ internally within us as we move freely about. The body, any body, is a vessel which contains life and is shaped by it. Life is both of the body and transcendent, existing beyond it. Life exists within the continuously unfolding moment. Life is not a ‘thing’ so one can hardly expect awareness, consciousness and intelligence to fit neatly into a limited organ, however we define it. The roots of this reach back into the study of evolution, ecology, cell biology, neurobiology, the metabolism and thermodynamics of life and the expanding field of quantum biology.

This latest thought piece has been inspired by three recent books I’ve read, Ed Yong’s, “An Immense World”, Paco Calvo’s, “Planta Sapiens” and Zoe Schlanger’s, “The Light Eaters”. I am not a scientist. I’m a student driven to make sense of this world. The connections and conclusions I make here are mine, although they may be suggested by the writings of others. Continue reading →

On Ornamental Trees and the Remaking/Unmaking of Place: Revising the City of Redmond’s Tree List, part 2

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How Much to Water?

Recommending trees from climates with significantly wetter growing seasons needs to stop if we are to continue growing our population. Landscapes as designed, and managed, are the single largest user of residential water. Recommending trees which ignore this problem is irresponsible. Lower water use residential landscapes are possible. Local codes and recommendations must, however, reflect this priority.

Additionally, how much to water is a bit of a mystery to all of us and especially so to non-gardeners. How much? How often? Our watering practices should be determined by the local precipitation and the tree’s needs. What is commonly done, however, is that we water for our lawns and that largely determines what our trees receive, unless we have separate drip systems. A tree’s root system doesn’t stay neatly between the lines. They quickly extend out well beyond the span of the tree’s leafy canopy. In many cases even 2-3 times as far, taking up water and nutrients. A roots of a tree, planted in a small bed, adjacent to an irrigated lawn area, will move out into the lawn. A tree isolated in a xeric bed with only a few drip emitters, will quickly demand more than such a meager system affords it and such a tree, if it requires summer moisture, will struggle while competing with its nearby  ground level growing neighbors. Again ‘neighbors’ should share compatible requirements so all can thrive on the same ‘diet’ and moisture regime. Continue reading →