Recently in Botany
The Hidden Desert:
You take a step backward and feel a sharp pain in your calf. You turn: a plant with swollen stems and sharp spines has invaded your personal space, puncturing your skin. You suppress a curse, opting for something milder. "Stupid cactus!" But is it a cactus?
The Hidden Desert:
Giant Sequoias and coast redwoods are among the many trees put on a group's endangered list, but the story of whitebark pine should not be overlooked.
The Hidden Desert:
From the Joshua trees and saguaros to the raggedy chollas, there are a lot of odd-looking plants in the desert. You'll have to get out of your car and look around to really get to know one of the oddest.
The Hidden Desert:
It's one of my favorite plants in Southern California, but I'm never sure what to call it in polite company.
The Hidden Desert:
I've warned of the danger of human-created climate change since the early 1970s, so you might expect me to be completely on board with this analysis. I'm not.
The Hidden Desert:
Heading downhill yesterday toward "downtown" Joshua Tree I saw it. It was the developing stalk of a flower, growing out of one of my neighbors' Agaves.
The Hidden Desert:
If it seems to you you've heard the word "milk-vetch" come up in one desert environmental issue after another, you're remembering right.
The Hidden Desert:
If the Mojave Desert gets some rain in the next six weeks, then we might just see one of the desert's least-understood phenomena take place, as Joshua trees work to create a new generation of themselves.
The Hidden Desert:
I don't know what kind of oak it is, and I don't realize as I take a dead leaf for later identification that I'm about to connect one of humankind's oldest technologies with one of our newest.
The Hidden Desert:
All life on earth, every thing that lives and has ever lived, every bird and beetle and box elder tree shares a common ancestor. We are each and every one of us related, each and every one of us the front of an impossibly ancient flood of genes rising from a single spring.
Botany:
It's the second tree in Goleta that has been recognized as a "national champion."
The Hidden Desert:
Joshua trees may denote hot deserts in many minds, but the place they live in gets pretty cold as well.
Commentary:
Here's why cryptobiotic soil crust is every bit as crucial to maintaining the California's ecological health.
Wildlife:
The Mojave has long stood in, in the public mind, for barrenness, an impression reinforced by generations of forbidding location shots in westerns and other films, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
Commentary:
The birds are excellent at storing food, but they do lose a significant portion of their acorn caches to germination.
Botany:
You see it everywhere in the desert: mature shrubs with little plants of other species in their shade.
Botany:
The California desert is a botanical frontier, and there are discoveries to be made around every bend of the wash.
Commentary:
We know so little about the Black Hills in Imperial County. This piece may well be the only published description of the range's flora and fauna, sketchy as it is.
Botany:
A sea of sagebrush may appear monotonous to the casual observer, but it turns out sagebrush is a pretty complex thing.
Commentary:
Unless these storms bring Southern California some much-needed rain this week, most of the California desert isn't going to have a stunning spring wildflower display this year.
'Slake' Video Project Puts Heat on LADWP Over Owens Valley
The story of the Owens Valley Water War is usually told in the past tense, but it still unfolds today, a century later. And a forthcoming video series intends to bring us all up to speed.
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