Botany

The botany category includes the posts I write about plants themselves. Since I am passionate about wildflowers, many of my posts celebrate them in some way. It can be individual flowers, like iris, fireweed, goldenrod, and yarrow; families of flowers, like the Asteraceae; a genus of beautiful vampires, the Castilleja. I write about rare plants, sometimes in extreme conditions. There are posts on the magic of photosynthesis, 0n why lichen is saving the world, and why there’s such a wild abundance of plant diversity. For Halloween, I’ve explored why there are so many ghostly white flowers and celebrated slightly ominous orange flowers. I have fun with the idea of spruce family planning, with comparing cactus flowers to filmy lingerie. And there’s a post on the seedheads I love so much. Many of these essays are also about the ecology of the plants and their habitat.

The galleries don’t get categories, but most would fall under botany: wildflowers from Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, and Missouri. There are galleries for grasslands in Colorado and two prairies in Kansas, one a ranch, one a remnant tallgrass prairie. There’s one for white flowers, one for cactus flowers, and one for seedheads. Enjoy!

The King in winter

I live on a small mountain next to a larger one. Both are modest as mountains go, but at 2600′ Mount Tamalpais reigns over the area like the queen she is. My apartment is halfway up one of her foothills. If I walk up a steep fire road for a quarter of a mile, I

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Fireweed: Alaska’s glowing icon

I could have brought to Alaska a passion for fishing, or for mountains, or volcanoes, glaciers, mighty rivers, wildlife. If so, I might have chosen a different icon. Salmon, Denali, the Matanuska Glacier, the Yukon River, a grizzly bear, moose, or bald eagle. But, though I treasure all of them, my passion is for wildflowers.

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Cactus lingerie

Desert prickly pear cactus (Opuntia phaeacantha) along the trail to Corona Arch in Moab, Utah by Betsey Crawford

I had never been a fan of cactus. Prickly, tough-skinned, ungainly. Leaves so attenuated they’ve become sharp-tipped spines. Interesting shapes, perhaps. Fascinating as examples of environmental adaptation, thriving from western Canada to Patagonia. But nothing to love. Things have changed. When I first came to the southern California desert and hiked in the spare open

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The California gold rush

Vivid fall color in aspen leaves (Populous tremuloides) turning the whole forest yellow in Lundy Canyon, near Lee Vining, California. Photo by Betsey Crawford

I am a native of the northeastern United States, where spectacular fall color is the rule. After a few years of living in the profound all-year green of coastal northern California, I asked a friend where to go to find color. To the eastern Sierra Nevada, she said, so off we went. It was glorious. This yearly gold rush is a gift of many forces meeting — every one of them a wonder in itself.

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A season of butterfly lilies

Lovely white with red and pink markings butterfly mariposa lily (Calochortus venustus) by Betsey Crawford

The way Earth tosses beauty about fascinates me. She doesn’t save splendor only for grand vistas and awe-inspiring mysteries. She spreads it at our feet the minute we leave the pavement we are so attached to. She invites us to pay deep attention, often to the smallest of treasures. She strews exquisite mariposa lilies in the unlikeliest of places.

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Be astonished. Tell about it.

The ability to center ourselves among the beauties of this challenging, whirling world is one of the greatest gifts of Earth. This is not superficial beauty, as pleasant as that is, especially for flowers. This is the beauty lying deep in the heart of creation. Beauty as energy, generativity, as the endless cycle of life, death, rebirth. Beauty as the slow evolutionary dance of function and form. As healing, exaltation, and inspiration.

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Happy Halloween: entangled in webs

Because of its ubiquity, everywhere we go we are treading on an intelligent underground. Beings that can communicate, transport, find their way from one goal to another along the most efficient route. That can overcome problems. negotiate with other beings, sort through options. That know what is happening at the farthest reaches of their vast network. So far, how they do all of this  remains a mystery, as does so much nonhuman wisdom. 

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Tending the wild

Leopard lily (Lilium pardolinum) Sierra Nevada, California by Betsey Crawford

One clear blue and gold fall day near the beginning of seventh grade, I stood on the shore of the Hudson River with a group of classmates, contemplating the oyster shell fragments at my feet. That was the year we learned about our town, Croton-on-Hudson in southern New York. The instructor for the day told

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