Late Magnolias

There was a very late cold period and a long winter generally in Bellingham. The Magnolias are blooming late and out of their usual order this year.

Magnolia 'Genie'

Magnolia 'Blushing Belle'

Magnolia x loebneri 'Merrill'

Magnolia 'Blushing Belle'

Magnolia stellata

Magnolia stellata

Magnolia 'Blushing Belle'

Magnolia 'Blushing Belle'

February 12, 2016

San Francisco Botanical Gardens

Magnolia dawsoniana

Magnolia campbellii v. mollicomata 'Lanarth'

Magnolia campbellii

Magnolia campbellii

Magnolia doltsopa

Magnolia campbellii

Magnolia x soulangeana 'Picture'

Magnolia sprengeri v. sprengeri 'Diva'

Magnolia campbellii 'Strybing White'

Magnolia 'Vulcan'

Extreme Fitness

I saw this article on facebook and I thought the ideas about the popularity of crossfit and other extreme fitness activities were interesting and that the imagery was pleasing. It made me think of aerial and something that Elena once said:

"Yeah, of course it hurts, it's circus, that's what you're paying for."

"It makes sense that for those segments of humanity who aren’t fighting for survival every day of their lives, the new definition of fulfillment is feeling as if you’re about to die."

Stone Fruit

The stone fruit are flowering.

Japanese Apricot - Prunus mume 'Contorta'

Flowering Plum - Prunus cultivar

Pink double Flowering Cherry (Prunus)

Semi-double flowering cherry (Prunus) cultivar

White flowering cherry (Prunus) cultivar

Ok this one is not actually a stone fruit. It's a white Flowering Quince  (Chaenomeles cultivar). Still a member of Rosaceae family though.

Hyacinthus orientalis

The rest of the hyacinths I am forcing have started to bloom. They smell lovely.

Silver Trees

The Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco happens to have a climate hospitable to the beautiful and endangered Silver Tree (Leucadendron argenteum), a protea relative from the Cape Town area of South Africa.

Silver Tree in the morning sun

Sliver Trees have beautiful soft gray-green foliage and are striking, even from a distance. The leaves themselves are covered with fine white hairs.

Furry Silver Tree leaves

The are large silver trees growing at the main entrance to the San Francisco Botanical Garden and in the South Africa section. 

Magnolias

It's magnolia season in San Francisco. I love them all.

Magnolia campbellii

Magnolia doltsopa

Magnolia campbellii

Magnolia dawsoniana 'Clarke'

Cabo San Lucas

For MLK long weekend I went to Cabo San Lucas in Baja California Sur. This is El Arco. My favorite place near Cabo San Lucas.

El Arco -  Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur,  Mexico

The weathered rocks at the tip of the cape are beautiful and otherworldly. They rise steeply out of the hard, large-grained yellow sand and in some cases, straight out of deep water, creating a pinnacle habitat for wildlife across different depths.

Weathered rocks at the tip of Cabo San Lucas

The desert flora is beautiful. There were many species of cacti and thorny shrubs, and this tiny beach creeper, which I didn't recognize.

Unknown beach flower - any idea what this is?

Even though there there aren't large growths of stony coral around Cabo, there are many familiar reef fishes. Including this puffed up Arothron meleagris we found by the jumping rocks.

Golden Pufferfish (Arothron meleagris)

Proteas in the Park

Last weekend I went to Golden Gate Park's San Francisco Botanical Garden twice. The second time I paused in the South Africa section to take some pictures of the beautiful Proteas, blooming through the cold.

Protea repens

The Protea family has members in South Africa, Oceania and South America many with large showy, complicated inflorescences. What appears to be a single flower is actually a collection of spiky or feathery petal-like bracts surrounding a dense cluster of true flowers.

Protea neriifolia 'Pink Mink'

Protea neriifolia 'White Mink'

Protea cynaroides, the King Protea, is the floral emblem of the Republic of South Africa.

Protea cynaroides

Leucodendron, or cone-bush, is another member of the Proteaceae from South Africa.

Leucodendron 'Safari Sunset'

Leucodendron 'Safari Sunset' bush

Lilium 'Casa Blanca' & Hyacinthus orientalis

Lilium 'Casa Blanca' is a pure white Oriental lily hybrid. Last weekend I bought three stems at Urban Flowers, and today there are six beautiful white flowers filling the apartment with their intense sweet fragrance. It's one of my very favorite smells.

Lilium 'Casa Blanca'

Lilium 'Casa Blanca' 

I picked the deep brownish-red anthers off each flower as it opened. I don't know if this prolongs the vase life or not, but it does keep the wet, powdery pollen from staining the flowers, and anything underneath them on the table.

When I was growing up in Washington, each year I would plant Lilium 'Stargazer' Oriental lilies, which are pink, white and yellow, with a similar scent. Because we had no fence to exclude deer and many slugs, only about half of them ever bloomed, but they were some of my favorite bulbs in the garden. 

Dutch hyacinths are another type of sweetly-scented bulb that I planted around my mom's house when I was younger. Though the original house burned down, the dense cylinders of deep blue Hyacinthus orientalis flowers still emerge around its outline each spring. Deer find hyacinths unappetizing and they survive the cold wet winters well, so this fall I planted 40 more in the yard - some beneath each new tree tree. 

Hyacinthus orientalis

In my own apartment in San Francisco, I force hyacinths in victorian style hyacinth vases that cradle the purple, papery bulbs above a constant supply of water. The first of the winter's forced flowers are just beginning to open.

Detail of the first hyacinth flower opening

When I was about 12 or so first heard a famous rhyme written by an ancient persian poet. The English translation reads:

"If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,

and from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,

Sell one, and with the dole,

Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul."

I don't know about souls, but I think of this line almost every time I see hyacinths.

1.7.2013

I've applied to volunteer at the San Francisco Botanical Garden.

Magnolia (x soulangiana) x campbelii

Freshwater Shrimp: A Delicious Dish

Yesterday I went on a hike with Javier - the caretaker of our house - down to a jungle creek. Javier has lived in the area around Cuervito all his life. He doesn't speak much English so all our conversations took place in Spanish.  He taught me a number of names and facts about the local wildlife as well as some stories from his life.

Cardulovica (Panama hat palm) flower beginning to open

Javier has 22 brothers and sisters and he took me to a waterfall where they all used to swim on Sundays when he was young. He hadn't been to the spot in 10 years, but we still found it quickly and easily. There was no path down to the creek, really, we navigated down an incredibly steep and slick face, composed of the wet clay soil and a topcoat of slippery leaves. Partway down the face we paused so Javier could cut us long, sharp walking poles with machete. My pole kept me from falling several times but I also kept picturing how gutted I'd be if I slipped onto it.

Approaching the pool at the base of a 30 m waterfall

The waterfall was several times higher than the one we went to previously. Almost immediately on arrival I spotted one of the freshwater shrimp my sister had mentioned before. I pointed it out to Javier and he said

"¡Agárralo! Él no muerde - acaba de quitarse de la cáscara!"

I have seen and handled lots of crayfish in the united states and they have strong claws and hard shells. When they pinch, or snap their tails on your fingers it can really hurt, so I was a little bit timid. This strange shrimp was both large and alien to me. The foremost arms and claws were nearly as long as the rest of the body and it seemed disproportionate and possibly dangerous, even if it had just shed its shell.

Javier kept repeating that it wouldn't bite so I reached into the water and herded it toward him (I still didn't want to grab it myself). The shrimp was quick and slippery, but eventually we cornered him into the shallows and Javier grabbed him.

Javier holding the freshwater shrimp, freshly-pulled from the quebrada

Javier said that sometimes the locals come down to the stream at night with flashlights and collect up to 4 kilograms of the shrimp in a night. Once we'd wrapped the shrimp up in a plastic bag and put it in my backpack we sad down by the water and chatted about the animals, plants, geology and human history of the area.

A close-up of the newly-molted freshwater shrimp we caught near Cuervito

There is still gold in some of the quebradas, like the one we visited. Javier explained how the oreros sift it out of the sand and gravel and how some people seek out the ancient graves of the natives that often contain caches of gold. Javier had personally seen two palm-sized gold figurines - one of a vulture and one of a frog - collected in such a way. He'd also once served as a guide for an American who recovered 11 troy ounces of gold from the area's streams!

On the way back up the hill he told me about how the perezosos (sloths) favored the guarumo (Cecropia obtusifolia) trees. We searched their scarred, bare trunks but didn't see any sloths.

I tried to get Javier to take the shrimp home and eat it, but he insisted it was mine, and that'd I'd better not forget about it in my backpack. So I took it home and fried it up with my mom and sister!

It was actually super tasty. Unlike the strange or muddy taste crayfish can sometimes have, the tail of our shrimp tasted like lobster and the claws like crab. It was an awesome midafternoon treat. Especially when paired with some incredibly juicy oranges from one of Javier's trees.