The Blinglish World Wide Web

If you've spoken with Michael any time in the last year he might have told you about Blingland, a place located outside our solar system and about which only he knows.
 
He's generally fairly cagey about the precise details of Blingland. But today, at the Maker Faire, he made something that offers a glimpse Blinglish technology. Here's what he describes as the Blinglish World Wide Web.

Hanging on at the edge of the world

It's about as far West as you can go in mainland America. And I'm glad I read about how people had been washed off the very granite outcrop we were standing on (even though we were some fifty feet about the sea) after we'd returned from the hike.
 
Here's the view in one direction towards the Southern tip of Point Reyes.

And here's the view looking North.

And down there in the bottom right is a delightful little stonecrop, thriving through every kind of weather in this wind and wave-blasted place.

Bright yellow-green lichen

I found this striking lichen on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin last weekend.

It was even more emerald in color in situ. The rock was just shy of the big serpentine outcrops that you get up at the top of Mt. Tam. I was interested to see if any lichens could stomach the asbestos-laden California state rock. Not many could. But here's one piece of serpentine that seemed to be able to host lichens. Maybe it was at the edge of the outcrop and so less pure.

In Marin . . .

the wildflowers are quite spectacular right now (in Palo Alto, they're pretty much over already).

These mustards are at McClures Beach, nearly out at the north end of Point Reyes. One reason why they stay vibrant late into the spring is the fog. Here's how Bolinas looked this morning (well, the view is from Bolinas, looking at Stinson Beach with Mt. Tam behind).

But Mt. Tam was above the fog. Here's what the weather was like up there.

And the Mt. tam wildflowers were further along. Still beautiful, though.

Vita Sackville-West on Nature

In a July, 1950 column for the Observer, Vita Sackville-West writes that the two most popular varieties of Alstromeria do not mix well together thanks to a striking color clash.  It leads her to note that:

" . . . whoever it was who said Nature made no mistakes in colour-harmony was either colour-blind or a sentimentalist.  Nature sometimes makes the most hideous mistakes; and it is up to us gardeners to control and correct them."

All gardening takes hubris, of course.  But perhaps not always quite this much.  

A Pocket Handkerchief Tree

Or maybe not.  It has several names.  I asked Michael what he would call it and he said 'Ghost Flower Tree.'   Ada thought 'Bat Tree.'  

In the UK it's known as the Pocket Handkerchief Tree and, indeed, the Ghost Tree.  In its native China, it's called the Dove Tree.

The tree's botanical name is Davidia involucrata, which wouldn't tell you that it's a Chinese native unless you knew that the David for whom it is named was Abbe Armand David, the French Franciscan missionary and naturalist who explored China in the 19th century.  David was the first westerner to document the tree, as well the first to know of the Giant Panda. 

Sadly, the tree is rare now in China, but it remains popular in the US and UK where it's grown as a specimen ornamental.  

This one is in Uppark in East Sussex.  

And when we are dead they will make a path from our bones

is what one could imagine a traumatized deer telling his family after straying too near the grounds of Uppark, the late 17th-century mansion perched bracingly on the English South Downs.
 
Along with its fine collection of paintings and Georgian plaster-work, the house features a two-room outdoors Game Larder, wherein the deer, rabbits, pheasants, doves etc. brought in by the Fetherstonhaugh family hunts were hung until considered ripe enough to eat.
 
Outside the larder is a rather attractive path made with pebbles, flints

and what, if you look closely, you realize are thousands of deer bones stuck on end.

In one sense it's a wonderful example of making use of every part of the animal you kill. Wasting nothing of the beast is a kind of respect.
 
But in turning the fact of the kill into decoration, it also transgresses a strong contemporary taboo.
 
We don't line the route to every McDonalds outlet with steer bones, after all -- not even the short walkway into temples of the carnivorous like St. John.
 
Maybe we should.

Surprise!

Well, it's hardly stealth gardening, as this thing has been in the ground for two years now, but my beloved wife is no great friend to Echium wildprettii, AKA The Tower of Jewels.  So the planting of one of these Canary Island biennials in my front garden has been something of a black ops project.  

The first year, it sits decoratively, and unobtrusively, low.  Then in the second it loses all sense of decorum and shoots ten feet into the air like something out of Dr. Seuss.  And then, before it dies, it showers the ground with tens of thousands of annoyingly fertile seeds.  It is also unremittingly vulgar, makes anyone who touches it itch and we really don't have the space to do it justice, but the bees and butterflies love it.  And it's one of those collectors' plants that you grow because of the plant and in despite of what it does to your already pitiful excuse for a landscaping scheme.  

If you live near by, come see it before it's over.