A visit to the east bay

Normally, we don't go there. It's hot and the traffic is terrible. But today is special. We have reservations to tour the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek. The Bancrofts were the biggest booksellers in the West in the mid-19th century and later became a dynasty of agriculturists and philanthropists (i.e., the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley... Bancroft Avenues in every old California city, et cetera).

Ruth Bancroft, the first woman to graduate from UC Berkeley's architecture program and grandaughter to the original family rainmakers, saw her first succulent in the mid 1950s and started collecting them in clay pots. By the time she amassed 4000 potted succulents, it was decided she should have her own garden. The docent says she's 98 years old today, and still gardens. The Garden has incorporated and there's an appurtenant "conservation easement" on the land so it can never be developed.

A tree in the parking lot catches my eye.



A yellow-flowering cestrum? No, I think it's Tecoma stans.



I like the leaf on this plant.



Inside the garden...A visitor asks what this is and the docent tells her it's a daisy. We know better. This is California's other native poppy.



Romneya coulteri, aka Matilija Poppy or Fried Egg Flower. Tough and invasive, many call it a monster. It's hard to get started (very delicate roots) but once it gets going, stands easily reach six feet high and form expanding thickets. Flowers in late spring through summer.



Moving on. Looking one way...



Looking another...



The perfect mix of control and uncontrol.

Echinocactus grusonii, Barrel cactus. Weaponized plants feel too threatening in my small yard. But sometimes I think it might be nice to have one of these.



These snaky ones are hip right now.



Nice flower.



I love the green fissures running down the trunk of this thorny tree.



The thorns are cool too.



But in my garden, I'd prefer to live with the deeply fissured Valley Oak.


He called this a Bottle Tree. Does that make it
Adansonia gregorii? According to Botanica, the other common name for the Adansonia is "dead rat tree".

UPDATE: Ah, not Adansonia; this is Brachychiton rupestris. (Thanks, Sue!)



He says this is the endangered Brazilian wine palm. I don't know the Brazilian wine palm, but I know of two rare Chilean wine pams in San Francisco. They look different than this one, so perhaps it is Brazilian.



I like the plant growing over this lava rock.



I had a euphorbia like this once. It was an indoor plant and I put it outside to get some sun one day, and it promptly died a very brown, gooshy death.



My camera didn't know what to focus on in this salvia. Is it 'Whirly Blue'? I'm not sure. Its fragrance suffused the garden.



Back home, my little rock garden seems pathetic in comparison.



But I've got some flowers.



Unrelatedly, but next to the rock garden, I'm pleased with my combination of orange zinnia and silvery Verbascum bombyciferum in a dirty terracotta pot.



My last garden post here.

"This school has saved my daughter's life," said Marcia Shear of Long Island, whose 13-year-old daughter, Samantha, used to punch herself in the head so often that she detached both retinas.

After she received a few high-level shocks, Shear said, the self-abuse stopped. "I am livid at these people and pieces of garbage who think they know what they're doing. Let them come and sit with my child and go through what I've gone through for 11 years."

Link requires registration.

Metafilter commenters object.

After we saw Super Size Me we left the theatre absolutely dying for a double cheeseburger. Well, [Feed] finally did it. We've officially given up food. Eating disorder here we come!

Possibly not-safe-for-work trailer here.

Eww.

What food can you bring through customs?

Cheese. "If it's runny and gooey, we won't let it in," says Janice Mosher, manager of the customer service center for the CBP. But interpretations vary on which cheeses are enterable, and inconsistency abounds. For years, American cheese lovers have exchanged tales of smuggling in young raw-milk cheeses, such as raw-milk Camembert, which is illegal to sell in this country because it has been aged less than 60 days. The raw-milk cheese regulations are the FDA's bailiwick but, at least for the time being, the FDA doesn't care what you bring in for yourself.

"Currently, there are no restrictions on importation of cheeses for personal consumption," writes FDA press officer Michael Herndon in an e-mail.

But the USDA is another matter. The virus that causes foot-and-mouth disease, a livestock illness, can persist in high pH (low acid) cheeses, according to Dr. Christopher Robinson, senior staff veterinary medical officer at the National Center for Import and Export, a branch of the USDA. So the USDA frowns on fresh ricotta and cottage cheeses from abroad because they may have high-pH whey added back to them. Also suspect are cheeses "that pour like heavy cream," says Robinson, who mentions mascarpone and Vacherin Mont-d'Or.

In theory, then, only the softest, moistest, runniest cheeses should raise a customs agent's eyebrows. But in the field, agents may operate more cautiously.

Link.

Pet's Rest has interred more than 13,000 pets, ranging from goldfish to rabbits to a monkey to dogs, in nearly 60 years of business, C'de Baca said. He said that decades ago, the founders of Pet's Rest, C'de Baca's in-laws, and one of the principles in Cypress Abbey Co., agreed verbally to allow Pet's Rest to use vacant property next to the cemetery.

After C'de Baca took over the cemetery, he entered into a formal 20-year lease with Cypress Abbey in 1986, saying he believed Pet's Rest would be able buy the property outright.

But the lease documents make no provision for a sale, and indicate the property had to be returned in its original condition within 90 days of the lease ending in May 2006, said David Friedenberg, an attorney for Cypress Abbey.

C'de Baca said he made multiple attempts to try to purchase the land.

"I'm an optimist," C'de Baca said. "I thought (Cypress Abbey) would come around."

Friedenberg said Cypress Abbey "feels bad" for pet owners, but said a sale was never in the offing.

"The lease is very, very clear,'' Friedenberg said. "We're concerned about what happened, but (Cypress Abbey) needs the land, and they've been waiting 20 years to get the land back."

Link.

Astronomers have spotted a huge cloud of fiery gas speeding through a distant cluster of galaxies. They say it is the biggest object of its kind ever seen.

The gas ball contains more matter than a 1,000 billion Suns, and is plunging through the Abell 3266 cluster of galaxies at about 750 kilometres per second. The fireball is about 3 million light years across, roughly 5 billion times the diameter of the Solar System, and reaches temperatures of tens of millions of degrees.

Link.

I love astronomy and cosmology. But everything's always gotta be "1000 billion" and "3 million light years". It makes me think of Cordelia in Buffy 1.3: "Okay, enough with the hyperbole already."

"The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday." Link.

I can't think of many things more depressing than that.

"[E]x-Black Flag frontman [Henry Rollins] pens a letter to everybody’s favorite right-wing nutcase author, Ann Coulter."

NSFW (bad language) Link.

If you know Henry Rollins at all, you most likely knew he was Black Flag's ex-frontman.

News from a small city garden...

What's the latest?

Looking down from the deck, I see the Dragon arum opened.



Let's have a closer look.



What can I say--it was an impulse buy. Happily, it doesn't smell like death. Yet. It's supposed to--it attracts flies as pollinators. I didn't know that when I bought the bulb.

I found out about the bad smell after I bought it and decided not to plant it because I figured my boyfriend would object. But when he found the bulb starting to grow in the garage, he suggested I go ahead and plant it anyway. Even after I explained the noxious smell of death part, he said go ahead. )Sigh( If that's not true love, I don't know what is!

In the same bed:

Yellow monkey flower.



Salvia and penstemon.



A visitor complaining about poor service.



Asarum caudatum, wild ginger:



Not the culinary ginger, but you can make a refreshing tea from the roots. Or so I've read. Maybe I'll try that next year when the clump is big enough to divide.

Geranium maderense:



A groovy biennial. Before dying its second year, it throws up a huge infloresence of sorta rank-smelling flowers. If I let the flower die, the geranium will self-sow heavily in my yard and I'll have these plants popping up for years to come. And so will my neighbors. Heh, heh.

This deciduous fern comes up every year. I should learn what it is.



Coreopsis gigantea:



Native to the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. It should be dormant right now, but this one's only a year old. Maybe it'll be dormant next summer. It makes a big display of sunflowers with the first fall rains.



The tree fern will grow out for a couple years before it starts to grow up. I will be happy if it makes it to ten feet before we sell the house and move. I've got some yellow clivia planted behind it. Once the fern gets up, I think some Nicotiana and Cineraria would be nice in front of it. Maybe a Lapageria growing up into it.

You might guess this is a dahlia if you know what dahlia stems look like. You'd be right.



Dahlia imperialis. It grows ten feet in one year and makes big flowers in the dead of winter before going dormant and blowing over to start again next year. Here it was just a few months ago.

Aother big grower: Bartlettina sordida.



It will outgrow its space this year and I'll have to make some difficult pruning decisions. Well, it'll be fun.

Behind it, Illicium mexicanum. Mexican star anise. I'll show you pictures of this one when it blooms.




The garden: a work in progress...always.

Last gardening-related post here.

Very, very cool.

The result is a kind of "magnet sense" -- people who've had the [strong, rare earth magnet] implant[ed in their fingertips] report that they can tell when a wire is live and when they're going through a magnet security-scanner at a store, even when their laptops' hard drives are spinning up.

Quinn Norton of Wired News has had the operation and writes in detail about how it felt, what the problems were, and what she was able to do once it was in place. The most amazing part is that months after the magnet implant fragmented and Quinn lost her "sixth sense," it reassembled itself (magnets tend to draw towards one another) and the sense returned.

Link.

Those rare earth magnets are astonishingly strong.

I saw Barry Bonds hit No. 715 today. It provided me w/ much happiness.

"The social rupture of the 1960s and '70s had flung father and daughter to opposite coasts and opposite ends of the political and social spectrum. They were almost caricatures of what America was then: She was an acid-dropping lefty, and he was Hoover's law-and-order enforcer. While he was ordering surveillance on Students for Democratic Society and the Weathermen, she was searching for truth and meaning in communal living, free love and hallucinogens. While he was fielding calls from President Nixon on the hot line in his home, she was in Chile hanging out with Marxists."

Link.

"I moved to San Francisco from Boston, where beach fires like those currently allowed at Ocean Beach are completely unheard of. Spending a summer evening in the sand, hanging out with friends around a fire (or two...) has become a special part of my social life here, and I would hate to see this passtime legislated out of existence."

Link.

I would hate to see that too, although I never have bonfires at Ocean Beach.

A science teacher uses a rifle in a physics experiment; nervous nellies and busy bees freak out.

The .30-caliber bullet, he said, is fired into a foot-long, 8-pound block of wood hanging by cords from a ceiling mount. The students take measurements of the block's movement and mass and use that information to calculate bullet speed.

He said he fires the shot from point-blank range with all the students standing behind him, so there is no danger of an accident or ricochet. There has never been an injury or close call, he added.

"I've been doing this for years," said Lapp, who skipped two or three years after Columbine. "The students love it. They ask about it very early on in the year. It's one of the more exciting demonstrations."

Exciting is not the word, said Ted Feinberg, the assistant executive director for the National Association of School Psychologists.

"It's just absolute madness, from my point of view," said Feinberg, one of the founding members of the National Emergency Assistance Team, which has responded to most of the school shootings in the country. "It is not only crazy in concept, in light of the world we live in it is absolutely irresponsible."

Feinberg said he is shocked that a teacher would bring a gun to school in the wake of tragedies like Columbine, regardless of the educational purpose.

"Were there not other ways of illustrating whatever physical principles he was trying to demonstrate?" Feinberg asked. "What's the message we are giving bringing a loaded gun into a public setting and firing it off. It's a terrible model to project on students."

Link.

What a pussy.

How amusing, the psychological horror and disturbance unfurling madly from the delicate, privileged minds of Marin County high school students at the sight of...brace yourselves...a rifle. You know, "in the wake of Columbine".

Of course it's not about Columbine. It's about values. In Marin County guns signify the Other.

"You are Isabella freaking Rossellini. I don't care if you're starting to [oddly] look [more] like Mike Myers with every [passing] day -- you are not supposed to engage in tunic-and-trousers terrorism." Link.

I'm also depressed to see my hero/totem Sarah Michelle Gellar making an appearance on the cruelest, viciousest blog of all. Sigh.

"Toxicology tests confirm that four people found dead in a Yerington motel room died of carbon monoxide poisoning, authorities said Wednesday...Authorities believe the lethal fumes came from a malfunctioning swimming pool heater located beneath the victims' room."

Link.

Dracorex hogwartsia.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon is writing a new six-issue Buffy mini-series for Dark Horse Comics. The first volume is due out in October."

Link, via Warren Ellis.

Also from Ellis: Jill the Ripper?

I'm Your Man

There's a Leonard Cohen movie coming out.

Watch this guy dance!

"Do Not Resuscitate"

"[Mary] Wohlford, of Decorah, Iowa, got the [tattoo over her sternum] in February to hopefully eliminate the possibility of any Terri Schiavo-esque controversy about her medical wishes should she become unable to communicate them directly."

Link.

Today I painted the front steps and applied Water Seal to the deck, after having Jascoed the steps on Thursday and power washed both the steps and the deck on Friday.

Time to drink a Hawaiian Breeze* and watch Gilmore Girls reruns on TiVo!



*In a pint glass loaded with ice combine in order equal parts coconut rum, cranberry juice and OJ. Do not mix.

"It's sweet to forget this and therefore difficult to keep it in mind."

Link.

Preparations for a plant sale

Browsing the CA natives...

A Douglas Iris



Salvia apiana. Smells like liverwurst.



Salvia spathacea. Smells fantastic! Hummingbirds love this plant.



Another one the hummingbirds love--Mimulus gutatus, commonly called "Seep Monkeyflower". Kind of weedy-looking for me, but a nice flower.



Coreposis gigantea. Usually considered "a weird-looking plant". I have two of them. The one in a container is doing much better than the one in the ground.



Ceanothus 'Julia Phelps'. One of my favorite ceanothus. This isn't a very good photograph of it tho'.



Ceanothus 'Centennial' is not a favorite, but I like the picture.



Moving on from natives...

The rock garden succulents are fetching.









I love succulents in general.











Wisteria... I plant I enjoy in other people's gardens.



Protea (Leucospermum, more correctly). I'm ready for the debut of dwarf varieties. Why hasn't that been done yet?





More tomorrow...

Said about vines in the garden, but applicable to everything:

"Gardening is a continuing excursion from ignorance to ignorance, as what's familiar becomes hackneyed." Link.

How can people who wouldn't dream of drinking in a pub called Gestapo cheerfully hang out at the KGB Bar? If the swastika is an undisputed symbol of unspeakable evil, can the hammer-and-sickle and other emblems of communism be anything less?

...

[P]erhaps the strongest explanation is the simplest: visibility. Ever since the end of World War II, when photographers entered the death camps and recorded what they found, the world has had indelible images of the Nazi crimes. But no army ever liberated the Soviet Gulag or halted the Maoist massacres. If there are photos or films of those atrocities, few of us have ever seen them. The victims of communism have tended to be invisible -- and suffering that isn't seen is suffering most people don't think about.

"Communist chic?" The blood of 100 million victims cries out from the ground. To wear the symbols of their killers is no fashion statement, but the ultimate in bad taste.

And it's terribly unhip to point that out.
Link.

A lesson on cuttings:

"But something important was missing; I felt I just had to find a way to keep that rosebush. I couldn't very well dig it up. My only option was to take cuttings and try to propagate them. I didn't inherit my parents' gardening skill or, more important, their confidence, and I approached the task with energy born of sheer desperation. It was summer, not the optimal time to propagate a rose. But it was now or never.

Just days before the real estate closing, I gingerly snipped six or eight cuttings and carried them carefully home in damp newspaper. I put them into a hand-thrown pot (also from my parents' yard) in sand and perlite, watered them and covered them with plastic to keep in the moisture.

Every day I visited the pot -- all through the hot, dry summer. One by one, the cuttings dried into brown sticks. But two of them stayed green. I talked to them, stroked their leaves, watered them and shifted them around so they'd get just enough sun. And finally, new green leaves began to unfold on them.

Now Ethelred stands in all his enigmatic glory beneath the redwoods surrounding our patio. Just this morning I looked at my 'Perle d'Or' and there were two tight, slender rosebuds, just about to open."

Link.

It's really about desperation and [feining] confidence. So just do it!

Take spring cuttings, strip the leaves off green (new) stems, and stick them in a thoroughly wetted mix of two-to-one perlite to vermiculate. Keep in bright shade. Keep your fingers crossed.

I saw this movie today; it was hilarious.

Happy Birthday!

Today is Kitty's 17th birthday!

(No, we didn't let her eat all that tuna. And we blew out the candle right away.)

The promise of new life.

I found the bulb for this emerging amaryllis in my closet. I don't remember buying it.

"In my opinion great loss of life resulted from men and women becoming stupefied by liquor and being too tired and exhausted to get out of the way of the fire."

Link.

"Oh Mimi. You're wearing a cropped demin jacket as a shirt, and you appear to have stolen your boots from Chewbacca. Don't ever change."

Link.

The best news I've heard lately:

"The heavy storms that are drenching the [San Francisco] region today and have done so nearly every day in April will finally relent, said forecasters, who predict that next week will be filled with clear skies and sunshine." Link.

It's not just April. We had rain all March too. After a spectacularly sunny and warm January. Go figure.

Math equation for a perfect ass

Link.

"The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion, research by the University of London has found."

Link.


Where does Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls belong?

Because I'm remembering it as a man's book under this criteria.

The Centennial approaches...

San Francisco in 1906 was the largest city and most important port on the Pacific Coast, the financial center of the West, the ninth-largest city in the United States. The Palace was the biggest hotel in the West.

San Francisco had the most populous Chinatown outside of Asia, the U.S. Mint at Fifth and Mission streets was the largest in the world, and in its vaults was $222 million in gold, one-third of the country's gold supplies.

San Francisco had been a U.S. city for not quite 60 years, but by the turn of the 20th century, it was world famous.

Link.

And let's not forget this:

Rich San Franciscans drank pisco punches, and poor ones drank steam beer. San Francisco was on the cutting edge of drinking, and bartenders claimed they had invented a gin and vermouth concoction they called the Martinez cocktail, a drink now known as the martini.

Or this:

In 1906, San Francisco had five daily newspapers and half a dozen others in foreign languages, 42 banks and 120 places of worship, but also 3,117 places where liquor was sold.

Last post on the 1906 earthquake here.

San Francisco gets a Michelin Guide

"If obnoxious and smelly French people show up in your restaurant and make a scene, just accommodate them kindly."

Link.

Some spring planting.

Dahlia imperialis, "Tree Dahlia".



The pot has no bottom. When the trunk grows, I'll break the rest of the pot and remove it. For now I like having the plant roots slightly raised for better drainage. The soil in that area of the yard is heavy clay.

Nursery catalogs describe Dahlia imperialis as rare, but you can buy a stalk like this at the San Francisco Botanical Garden plant sales for $10. It to grows up 10 feet in one growing season (winter in California). When it goes dormant, you whack it back to 8 inches and start all over again. Eventually, the base gets broad and multi-trunked, and it will obscure the cement foundation behind it--hopefully without causing a structural issue.

Echium candicans, "Pride of Madeira".



This grows all over the place in California, but I don't often see it containerized, especially in this small a container. I have root pruned it once--reducing the root mass by about 30%--and it seems to be doing fine. The plant has remained a nice, small size. It gets verrry thirsty on hot, windy days here on my roof. The flowers are starting to open.



Salvia spathacea, "Hummingbird Sage", sometimes called "Crimson Sage".



One of my favorite California natives for the smell of the foliage. Some native sage enthusiasts find the fruity smell a little overwhelming and prefer Salvia clevelandii 'Winifred Gilman' above all others. I don't disagree too much.

From the J.L. Hudston catalog: "The famous African tree with a huge, swollen trunk up to 30 feet in diameter, and not more than 60 feet tall. The thickest trunk in the world. Large, white, hibiscus-like 6" flowers are pollinated by bats. The foot-long, gourd-like fruits are filled with refreshing, lemon-flavored pulp and edible seeds. Leaves are often eaten like spinach. The trunk stores considerable water, and is used as a reservoir, sometimes being tapped for as much as 1000 gallons. Hollowed out, they are used as rooms. Worshipped as a fertility tree."

That's Adansonia digitata, better known as the Baobab.

The Rooftop.

Vodka, lemonade, and...thyme.

My plant ID teacher mentioned it tonight. Sounds delicious. I can't find it online. Can't be that hard to devise tho'.

"That reads like a satire, written in the 1960s, about what nostalgia would be like in the future."

Link.

It is even more disturbing to learn that, while Mr. Hashemi sailed through Yale's admissions process, the school turned down the opportunity to enroll women who really did escape the wreckage of Afghanistan.

In 2002, Yale received a letter from Paula Nirschel, the founder of the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women. The purpose of the organization, begun in that year, was to match young women in post-Taliban Afghanistan to U.S. colleges, where they could pursue a degree. Ms. Nirschel asked Yale if it wanted to award a spot in its next entering class to an Afghan woman. Yale declined.

Link.

I’m writing by the light of the burning city. The fire is still twenty blocks from my house, but we came out here to spend the night because we have been afraid since the first earthquake shock. Then, the house swayed and creaked and trembled; rose and fell like a ship in a tempest. I couldn’t walk on the floor at all — had to crawl to the door on my hands and knees...

Link.


April 18 marks the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

"Sliced, the array included bold, thick lines of deep color running the length of vertically cut carrots. When chopped round, one carrot showed a deep, brown ring, a layer of persimmon/pumpkin-hued inner ring and a golden core. The outer skins of carrots come in mottled, speckled and evenly distributed jewel tones. Some colors are muted and dusty, others tropical, fruity and striking."

Link.

I have a weird allergy to raw carrots. They make my throat itch and nose run. Cooked carrots: no problem.

"The smallest MP3 player yet."

Link.

Geranium maderense.

"You're so right -- San Francisco is that cool kid in the back corner with the fuchsia scarf, and that is why I will always love it the best. But Los Angeles is the kid of indeterminate ethnicity, seated front and center with a pierced belly button and a couple of tattoos, who smells faintly of the beach, peeling an orange and smiling to himself while he rocks out to an Ipod. He's not such a bad kid."

Link.

"Sad news for sex-positive folk in Mississippi: a federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by an adult shop challenging that state's ban on the sale of sex toys. In other words, it remains a crime for responsible adults to sell vibrators to other adults there, but a gun? No prob!"

Link.

I shit a brick, because I thought she was going to report me for trespassing. Instead, she embraced me, stroked my hair, and said, ‘Oh, my God—the Marble Faun has arrived.’ I had no idea what she meant, but I was enthralled.”

Link.

The San Francisco Public Library has a collection of old San Francisco photographs online here. You can search the database by San Francisco neighborhood here. You can see old pictures of Bernal Heights (my neighborhood) here.

I'll have to post some "then and now" pictures.

"What did enlightened people do to support the [Iranian] strikers? Very little. Most Iranian intellectuals, former Marxist activists included, were consumed by polite electronic debates over the Dutch cartoons. Hundreds of striking drivers were arrested, as the cameras of the world's biggest news agencies shot images of the couple of dozen government-paid hoodlums throwing rocks at the Danish embassy in Tehran. Wives and children, even distant relatives of the activists, were hauled off into detention to force the union leaders to turn themselves in, as India's Communist Party threatened to leave the ruling coalition in New Delhi if India voted to refer Iran to the Security Council. Clearly, workers of the world ought to postpone uniting until other scores are settled."

Link.