Crab memorials

Attempting our annual Coastal Cleanup visit to San Gregorio beach, we were this year diverted south a mile or so to Pomponio State Beach (the shifting lagoon at San Gregorio was blocking the path down to the sea).

It was good to find Pomponio fairly litter-free. That gave us time to pursue other activities. 

Ada, in particular, was taken with the large number of Dungeness crab shells on the beach.  We hoped it was evidence of sea otters in the area. Still, she felt the need to mark their loss. As we walked back with our meagre pickings of fishing twine, bottle caps, cigarette ends and decomposing fishing lures, she took each crab shell and made a small memorial of it.

Here are a few:

Emandal rocks

Every Labor Day we trek up Highway 101 to backcountry Mendocino, to Emandal, a farm that's invited people to stay in redwood cabins on its property for over 100 years now.  There's a lot to like about the place, but one thing that always awes me are the rocks sat majestically in the North Fork of the Eel River.  

This year I swam down river from this one,

to this one, a distance of maybe a half a mile -- riffles, pools, massive sunken boulders and a million algaed pebbles; turtles, egrets, scores of fish, monarchs, swallowtails and redheaded ducks.  

War and Peace - 24 Hours in Marin

First, overnight at the Cavallo Point lodge -- nestled in a fog-resistant nook under the northeast side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Formerly Fort Baker, these buildings housed the soldiers who operated the gun batteries that defended the San Francisco Bay from potential invaders from the late 19th century through to the Cold War.  

Next, a drive through the Bunker Road tunnel under Highway 101 to Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands. Beyond windswept, the coastal scrubland is pocked with concrete gun emplacements, more old barracks and even a decommissioned Nike nuclear missile site.  

Military occupation marked the land but also preserved it from development -- just hop back through the tunnel to Sausalito and Mill Valley to see what it could look like if it weren't now a national park. The picture below belies the force seven or eight winds that greeted us. Maybe that helps explain the lack of development, too.   

And then into peacenik Marin.  

Along Highway 1, past the Zen masters at Green Gulch, the boho dropouts of Bolinas and to the bucolic foodie destination town of Point Reyes Station for lunch at Osteria Stellina, a modest temple to eating local that happens also to be one of my favorite restaurants in the world. After lunch, a quiet stroll around Toby's, which sells peace sign cake pans and is the only feed store I know with Tibetan prayer flags strung over its piles of hay. And last before we head for home, to the farmers market, where military Marin is long forgotten -- where peace, love, song, justice and environmental stewardship are so thick in air that they collectively suffuse the honey, bread, arugula and rainbow chard.

Thoughts on leaving Fairyland

It's rare the place that looks better every time you visit. Especially an aging children's theme park in an impoverished city. But that's been my experience of Oakland's indispensable Children's Fairyland.

The park is designed, really, for the pre-school set. So with Ada and Michael now aged 8 and 6, yesterday's visit was likely our last. I was glad, then, to find it looking better than it ever has before. 

The unique, modest and non-branded attractions -- like Willie the Whale -- all seem to have been freshly painted.

Even the little figures hiding up in the trees were in great shape.
 

And all the retouching seems to have been done by an artist with real skill this time.

But what was truly extraordinary was the quality of the landscaping.  Many of the borders were spectacular, like this one by the carrousel.  

The inspired organic, mostly native plantings were fairly new when we first visited six or seven years ago.  Now they are all grown in.  

The individual plant choices are delightful.

Even small pieces of fill in out of the way parts of the park are full of interest.

 

The park seems to have some sort of a sourcing deal with local growers Annie's Annuals. Their plants are on sale near the entrance. I bought me a dark red Fairy's Wand, of course. It didn't mention the variety on the label, but I hope it's this one. 

Gardens are notoriously prone to atrophy. Who knows how long Fariyland will be able to keep up a landscape (and hardscape, too) of this quality. But it was consoling to take our leave of the place at a time when it's so obviously thriving.

A good year for lilies

These fragrant pink trumpet lilies (possibly hybrid Division VIII orienpets; I don't remember) are five feet tall this year and the flowers are enormous. 

And despite Michael's best efforts to use their budding leaf stems for knotting practice, the fairy wands (Dierama pulcherrimum) are thriving too.  Today they were being visited by the smallest species of bee I've ever seen.  They were each no more than six or seven millimeters long.

Shabby chic hives

Here are the hives.  Very shabby chic, if you ask me. Jim the Bee Man (who makes the hives himself) is currently making a screen to raise the height of the fence on the right so they don't fly directly over the path running down the side of the neighbor's house. 

They're not likely to hurt anyone, but by mid-afternoon right now we've got bees racing over the fence in the thousands per second. It can look pretty intimidating.

The floral benefits of inertia

I've been meaning to divide the two big clumps of Dietes grandiflora in the median outside our house for ages. They're now out of scale with the rest of the border and flop over both on to the sidewalk and into the road. But then here they are in full fortnightly bloom in a snap taken yesterday.

Horticultural inertia does have its benefits.