We are restoring upland prairie habitat at Bald Hill Farm, including habitat for the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly.

A few years ago, I was invited on a walk along the Willamette River to look at a parcel of land that contained some remnant backchannels and a riparian gallery forest near Salem. The riparian forest was remarkable because it contained a number of enormous black cottonwood trees that towered over the ashes, alders, maples and conifers.  Cottonwoods are one of my most favored trees.  They thrive on floodplains.  Arno and Hammerly in their wonderful book, Northwest Trees, mentioned that cottonwoods in floodplains “grow tall and develop great, arching branch-trunks that form a light-filtering canopy high overhead.”  Some of the largest cottonwood trees soar over Read More

This country has always been defined by its grasslands as much as it has been by its forests, mountain ranges, and rivers. Grass informs our landscapes, shapes our history, and probably has more to do with our future than we realize. Our western grasslands are iconic. In 1541, on his quest for yet another fabled city of gold long before the pioneers headed west from St. Joseph, Coronado marched northeast from Mexico City to Kansas. In the middle of what would become Texas he noted, tersely, “I reached some plains.” Indeed.  He was the first European to encounter a sea of grass more vast than Read More

We recently spent a few gorgeous days in New York City, replete with its inimical street scenes, restaurants, and museums. Among other invaluable lessons, I learned that if you know ahead of time the price of a NYC latté, you will not enjoy sipping one. When we left, our camas were just beginning to send up their flower stalks. The flash-in-the-pan interlopers– tulips and daffodils— had already coloured the margins of our perennial beds and were in decline. Now was the time of the undisputed queen of the western Cascades. Early settler’s descriptions of the Willamette Valley vibrate with accounts of deep purple vistas—hundreds of Read More

Back before the dot com age, the fastest way to vast riches (besides marrying an heirless aristocrat with a bad cough) was to land a piece of the spice trade. Pepper, in particular, was worth several times its weight in gold. Until relatively recently, most of it came from India’s Malabar region—and even in the 5th century it was so valuable that marauding Visigoths plaguing Rome demanded ransom in pepper. Pepper pulled Vasco da Gamma around the African horn, and pepper fuelled the first fires of mercantilism—if even only one of your ships came in with a cargo of the stuff, you were set up Read More