I received a new camera, an Olympus E-PL2, a couple of days ago and took of few pictures of the garden yesterday. (The E-PL2 is a micro four thirds mirrorless camera that has a near-DSL-size sensor but a small body.) This was a tough year for the garden, but things always look brighter at springtime.

Last year we bought some new fruit trees (apricots, figs, and limes). The apricots are blossoming:

As are the plums.

The outdoor jade plants didn’t mind the dry weather.

Of course there’s no holding back the lemons (the persimmon in front is still thinking things over, however).

And there are some fuschia flowers out.

It feels like it’s taken forever, but the new Bay Bridge is finally entering its final months of construction, if reports can believed. To honor the old bridge, the Oakland Museum of California, in collaboration with Caltrans and the Bancroft Library, is compiling an oral history of the span. According to Louise Pubols, a senior curator at the museum (quoted in the SF Chronicle), “The Bay Bridge has that scrappy, underdog, proud, blue-collar identity, a lot like Oakland itself. It’s a workhorse. It gets stuff done.” According to historian Sam Redman (quoted in the same article), ”People always talk about the grace and beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it’s the Bay Bridge that changed the way people actually live.”

Emperor Norton had mandated a bridge connecting San Francisco, Yerba Buena Island, and Oakland back in the 1870s, but the bridge was not actually constructed until the 1930s as part of an economic stimulus program. In the early years the lower deck was used for train travel (a kind of proto-BART system). Today it’s part of one of the nation’s most nightmarish commutes, and as the new bridge adds no additional lanes this will not change. Because the Bay Area has an inadequate public transit system, it will be difficult to reduce auto traffic over the congested span. It’s too bad that current stimulus money is being put into a high-speed rail system through the central valley rather than into local urban transit that might actual get some people off the roads.

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Image of construction workers on the Bay Bridge via Tumbler images

This handsome fellow planted himself in one of our walkways. But what is it? My guess is it’s some kind of verbascum.

Here’s a glimpse of the swimming pool that became a garden, now in its fourth year -hard to believe it’s been that many already.

Carol is thinking it might be too early this year to start our tomatoes.

It’s been cold and rainy for many days, and there is no break in sight. Last night there was spectacular thunder and lightning, which is rare in the Bay Area, and even a water spout over the ocean and a small tornado in Santa Rosa. We looked outside last night to see a winter wonderland, even though it should be spring here by the bay.

We’ve lived in the SF Bay Area since the 1970s, and only occasionally have we seen hail blanket the ground like this — and we’ve never seen it linger this way. The ground was cold enough that it didn’t melt for hours.

I know this won’t look like much to folks back east. Hey, I lived in Wisconsin once upon a time. But it’s damned strange for us here. It continues to rain as I write. They say more hail could be on its way tonight or tomorrow. And on it goes …

I visited Muir Woods yesterday (in the company of a couple of beautiful women) via the main entrance and found it quite crowded — the only parking was a good ways down the road from the auxiliary lot. That’s one of the reasons we normally enter from the Pantoll or Bootjack trails. But the main redwood grove by the entrance really is quite spectacular, and I took a few pictures..

I’ve been taking pictures in Muir Woods for decades, but I feel it’s a difficult subject: it’s both very low (and quite green) light and also — perversely enough from the photographer’s standpoint — high contrast. Probably the best as a general rule would be a low ASA setting, a small aperture, and a very long exposure using a tripod. I didn’t have that luxury however, as I was just shooting with my trusty Canon A630. Still, these low-res samples might capture something of the feel of the day. (Expand to full screen or click through to the Flickr page for better views.)

It would be a good thing. Urban Forest Map is trying to make a log of all of the trees in San Francisco. The group is made up of government agencies, nonprofits, and private businesses. By mapping the city’s trees they hope to calculate the environmental benefits the trees are providing: “how many gallons of stormwater they are helping to filter, how many pounds of air pollutants they are capturing, how many kilowatt-hours of energy they are conserving, and how many tons of carbon dioxide they are removing from the atmosphere. The information we gather will help urban foresters and city planners to better manage trees in specific areas, track and combat tree pests and diseases, and plan future tree plantings. Climatologists can use it to better understand the effects of urban forests on climates, and students and citizen scientists can use it to learn about the role trees play in the urban ecosystem.”

You can add some trees to the count.

Took advantage of the nice weekend weather and worked in the garden. This year our problem is that everything’s filling all the spaces and getting crowded. We’re going to have to be fairly ruthless.

Took some photos and posted them to flickr. Click the image or follow this link to my flickr garden set.

This seven-minute film taken from the front of a San Francisco streetcar going the length of Market Street toward the Ferry Building is said to have been shot four days before the earthquake and fire of 1906, and to have survived because it was sent by train to New York for processing before the quake. Virtually all of the buildings shown (except the Ferry Building itself) were destroyed in the quake.

The street scene is lively and chaotic, and many details are fascinating.