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for the birds
My friend Brenda, a dedicated birder, found a yellow warbler on the sidewalk in front of her office in downtown Oakland the other day. Hoping the bird was just stunned, she picked it up. But it was...
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Betty and Arlene
I was being stalked by a chicken. I kept seeing her (a hen, I think) out the front window but she disappeared when I ran to get my camera. Nobody believed me. Then I see her again as I’m getting out of...
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goodbye to all thatch
I finally did it. My weed whacker and ten-dollar spools of nylon twine are history. So are the rampant armies of exotic weeds–bristly ox tongue, burr clover, Bermuda grass, cutleaf geranium, and...
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obituary for a garden
We notice when a garden is born. Enthusiasm and anticipation beget the patch of fresh dug earth with string-rows of vegetable starts, or a grandly schemed installation of lawn and flower borders....
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small worlds
There is nothing quite as clever as a garden of necessity. And, as I am discovering, nothing quite as beautiful as a gardener’s desire to create their own Eden within often daunting constrictions of...
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pandora is earth
tree of souls Originally uploaded by true dirt The Vatican has spoken: the movie Avatar substitutes worship of nature for religion, though the Pope’s newspaper concedes the movie has “extraordinary...
View Articlea geography of rain*
In Chiloquin barely an inch fell on fog draped cedars of the Siskiyou mountains, Twice that at Red Mound on the Oregon coast. At Sawyers Bar on the Salmon River, half an inch dampened the remnant saw...
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light snow in Ukiah; orchids in Marin
It’s spring. A heavy barrage of hail last night and 49 degrees this morning, mountains of clouds are scudding across the East Bay hills, southward, and rain is expected. A light snow has fallen in...
View Articleit’s hopey changey time
And how exciting is that! The pale green squibbly things on the Scarlet Oak’s naked limbs are brand new, never before seen leaves; the dead-as-a-doornail looking wisteria is changing right before my...
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Athena’s owl
Over a year has passed since I last wrote in true dirt and much has happened in that time–not in my garden but in my life. A couple of weeks after the last entry, my father died, suddenly but not...
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