Frisco Vista

This view of Muir Woods in Marin County is from soupboy’s photostream.
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Yesterday I attended the Goldman Environmental Prize Awards, as I have done most years since sometime in the early 1990s. The event is held in the city’s beautiful War Memorial Opera House, with a reception afterward at City Hall. The award honors grassroots environmental activists from around the world with a cash prize of [...]

The California poppy (Eschscholzia californica), the state flower, blooms profusely along the northern California coast from about February through September. The most common variety is a bright orange color, reinforcing the sate’s nickname, the golden state (which also alludes to the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush). This poppy-colored hillside was photographed on the central California coast between [...]

I once edited a book by the poet Michael McClure called Scratching the Beat Surface. One of Michael’s premises was that the natural world can be appreciated even in urban areas.
The screenshot above links to the website of Nature in the City, whose mission is “to conserve and restore the nature and biodiversity of San [...]

San Francisco was hardly a forest before the swell in its population in the mid-nineteenth century — it was mostly coastal dunes, scrub, and marshland. The city’s most extraordinary transformation was achieved by John McLaren, who magically conjured up a woodland out of Golden Gate Park’s dunes.
Today the city is home to many types [...]

This great map from the 1890s shows creeks in blue and marshes in green, with modern landfill in magenta. A larger version is at the Oakland Museum of California site.

The San Francisco Bay Area doesn’t have such a bad climate for fall color. The image above is of a Japanese maple; below is a Fuyu persimmon (both from my lot). But what we have is one of the world’s best climates for broad-leaf evergreens (you can see a lemon tree behind the persimmon), and [...]

Most guides will have you enter the Sobrante Ridge Regional Preserve from Coach Drive in Carriage Hills, but if you enter from the El Sobrante side — the trail head is at the end of Heavenly Ridge Lane — a short hike past the endangered Alameda Manzanita will take you to the top of the [...]

Bay Nature magazine, to the surprise of many, has managed to stay afloat for several years now. They’ve even started broadcasting on public television stations. It shows how much the Bay Area values its natural setting (relevant to this recent issue and this recent issue, for example).
I do think their website would be better served [...]

Bravo to Contra Costa supervisors who unanimously voted down an attempt to expand the East Bay urban limit line — a line overwhelmingly approved by area voters less than a year ago.
The proposal would have created a 75-home development in El Sobrante. El Sobrante (home to an endangered species of manzanita) is already suffering from [...]

First it was uppity sea lions. Now it’s coyotes. According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, coyotes are attacking dogs in Golden Gate Park.
Coyotes disappeared from the city after the 1906 earthquake. They appear to have returned sometime in the past decade via the south peninsula. Recently a coyote was tracked with [...]

Here’s a good plant for Bay Area gardens. Most people probably know the common stock that is grown as an annual in many parts of the country. This version, perhaps close to the wild species found in the eastern Mediterranean, is a perennial in most of the Bay Area. It has a woody stem and [...]

Annie’s Annuals in Richmond (at 740 Market Avenue) is holding their spring party this weekend, April 14-15. They will have free “supermarket sweep” raffles every hour — winners get 15 minutes of free shopping. There’s also a “gardening olympics” (”no athletic ability necessary”). Plus Calypso music, complimentary snacks and drinks, and gardening talks, as well [...]

It’s freezing — literally. Over here in the East Bay we’re looking at a week of lows around or under the freezing mark. I’ve been watering my plants and covering them with plastic at night when I can. But I don’t have enough plastic (or time) for all of them. My fuschias and brugmansias are [...]

So far the winter of 2006-207 has been a cool one in the Bay Area. But we got out for a short hike yesterday on Sobrante Ridge, and it was quite pleasant. The trail wasn’t muddy, and the manzanita was in bloom. I’m starting to post some pages on outdoor activities in the Bay Area.

Bay [...]