Want to feel connected to nature? Go field sketching.

3pm at the barn. It’s at least 90 degrees in the sun, and I’m sitting under a willow tree by an overgrown pond, waiting for my friend as she visits with her horse and does mysterious things (not sure I really want to know what it means to ‘clean his sheath’). It’s a parched, dusty, yellow afternoon. Out on the pond, invisible frogs make thrumming noises that sound more like generators than croaks, an egret (or perhaps a crane or a heron — I don’t know my birds) stalks on long legs, redwing blackbirds swoop from above, and hundreds of blue and red dragonflies shimmy a few inches above the water. I am sketching to pass the time.

This is one of the plants growing by the pond. It’s called little mallow (Malva parviflora), and you probably have some near you.

Caption: ‘Mallow – edible but slimy’

(Here’s a real photo of little mallow. Nope, I definitely don’t have a future as a botanical illustrator. Oh well.)

As my friend Emily puts it, sitting quietly outdoors is a great way to reconnect with nature. 

I’m not a spiritual person, but field sketching is one way I connect to the world around me. I wouldn’t be an environmentalist if I didn’t have that appreciation of all the weird and wonderful things that call Earth home. I also like sketching because drawing switches off the noisy, word-oozing part of my brain, and lets me see without the filter of language. It doesn’t matter that I’m not particularly good at it. Every time, I rediscover how interesting everything is when I pay enough attention. And, while you’re being still, you might just see some other things you wouldn’t have seen.

So…I have a challenge for you, if you care to accept: go outside and draw something this week. I think you’ll come away with a different understanding of the ‘ordinary’ things you rarely really look at.  If you like, send it my way and I’ll post it here with a link back to your blog.

I talked to Emily, a science illustrator, for her top field sketching tips, and here’s what we came up with.

• Be able to identify poison oak / ivy / sumac and know whether it grows in your area. You’ll be sitting while drawing. Picking the wrong spot is definitely capable of ruining your spiritual experience. Or any experience, for that matter.
• Pack a picnic and go with a friend (if you like company).
• Find a comfortable spot first. Then choose something to draw close by. While some things are worth discomfort, that’s not the point of this particular exercise.
• Pick a good subject. Something stationary and relatively small, like a plant with countable leaves, is a good place to start.
• Insecure or uptight about your drawing skills? Emily recommends a little alcohol to loosen you up. (I haven’t tried this personally.)
• Don’t worry about the results. No one expects you to turn out fabulously detailed and precise sketches. It’s one of those journey-not-destination things.

Have you gone field sketching lately? Or do you feel inspired to go now? I’d love to hear about your field sketching experiences and see your drawings. 

Virtual Nature Walk: Spring Edition

Last summer I took you on a virtual plant walk of my favorite preserve, the Fremont Older Open Space. Unfortunately, by July, things are pretty dead in California — dead enough to make you suspect that the ‘golden’ part of our ‘golden state’ moniker is a euphemism for dried up and brown.

Totally different story in early April. Oceans of grass up to my knee, budding leaves, and damp soil underfoot that sinks just the right amount when you step on it. It’s impossible for me to be there and not think that I’m an amazingly lucky person to be alive on this planet right now. This feeling is the single most important factor in why I am an environmentalist. We’ve absolutely got something worth protecting in this small blue and green planet.

Want to join me on a virtual nature walk? Just a warning: I am neither a botanist nor a photographer. But if you don’t mind wandering around with an amateur naturalist equipped with a cheap camera, come along! We’re going to sneak in the back entrance of the park this time. The trail starts in a wooded, damp area with lots of early spring vetches (no flowers yet), clovers, and blackberry brambles. Almost immediately, we come across this little guy (actually, slugs are hermaphrodites, and this one, at 7″, isn’t exactly little):

According to Wiki, the Pacific banana slug is the 2nd largest terrestrial slug in the world. Also my college mascot at UC Santa Cruz!

There’s a bizarre tradition of licking banana slugs, which apparently causes numbing due to toxins in the slime, but I’m thinking that I can live without that particular experience. (Also, it’s not good for the slugs.) So we leave it alone and continue up the path. It’s a beautiful morning, all clean air, cloud shadows, and bright light.

As we head up the incline, puffing just a bit, we pass by some coast live oaks with their dark, shiny leaves, plenty of California sagebrush on sunnier slopes, some toyon bushes (also called California holly), distant blue blossoms, and lots of other stuff I don’t know the names of yet. Ask me again in another year. Kevin likes this back entrance to the park because it gets straight to the point — up a steep hill and into the heart of the park. I think I might prefer the gentler entrance myself.

Right, then. At the top of the hill, we swing a right on to the Hayfield Trail, which overlooks lush green hills that are currently covered in wild oat grass. When the wind blows, it sounds like the ocean. The grass is just starting to go to seed; in another few weeks, it will be drying out and dead. In the meantime, it looks lusher than the nearby golf course.

Springtime in the California hills wouldn’t be complete without a couple of these, of course. Our iconic golden poppies are late this year due to the delayed rain, but they’re the usual eyepopping shade of orange. Apparently they’re late risers: it’s almost 10am, and they’ve yet to fully unfurl. I recently learned that golden poppies are not true poppies, but they’re perfectly suited for survival in California, being self-seeding, drought-resistant, OK with poor soil (like on highway shoulders), and easy to cultivate in gardens. There are fewer of them this year because of our weirdly dry and warm winter, but more may come up later.

Continuing down the path, we pass a couple of magnificent old coast live oaks. These rugged trees have deep roots to survive the yearly May-October California drought. The coast live oak also has small, glossy leaves to conserve water — the more surface area of the leaf, the more water the tree loses through evaporation. Live oaks, as the name implies, do not shed their leaves in the winter. California’s live oaks are being threatened by Sudden Oak Death. If you hike in more than one park, be sure to rinse off your shoes so you don’t carry the disease from one area to another.

Feeling a little warm? Let’s stand in the shade of this oak for a few minutes before going on. (Just a note: compressing the soil around trees, i.e. walking on their roots, can damage root systems, especially if lots of people do it. These trees are located just off the trail, but unless I really want to take a better look at something or use a treefinder key, I usually don’t approach.)

We’re passing through several types of mini ecosystems even in a relatively short walk. The fields are turning into dryer, warmer chaparral. On both sides of us are lots of shrubs with attractive glossy leaves that start off reddish when young and then turn bright green. Can you guess what they are?

Remember, unless you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re doing, don’t touch anything with leaves of three. The same compound in poison oak that causes allergic reactions, urushiol, is also found in poison ivy, poison sumac, cashew nut shells, and mango skins (in much smaller quantities). I don’t know if I’m sensitive to urushiol or not, and today is not the day to find out. Poison oak is an important part of this ecosystem, by the way: birds and other animals rely on its berries for food. Just because we thin-skinned humans can’t touch it doesn’t make it a bad plant.

As we round the hill, the air becomes noticeably warmer and stiller. There’s a drop off to the left and something like a cliff face to the right that seems to have created a microclimate. This is my favorite plant along this stretch:

These spiky purple flowers, with their unusual arrangement (several flowers are spaced out along a single stalk like meatballs on a skewer) are a type of local sage, also known as chia. They will produce lots and lots of edible chia seeds after they’re done blooming. If you pinch a leaf, you’ll be able to smell the characteristically pungent odor associated with sages, which are actually in the mint family.

We also see lots of manroot just beginning to form its big spiky seed balls, more feathery sagebrush, and a whole lot of mystery plants. A number of the small elderberry trees are just putting out their flat flower umbels. I’m pleased that the swarms of midges that plague this stretch in the summer have not yet arrived.

At the end of the warm stretch is a shady grove of eucalyptuses. (There are lots of different types; I have no idea which these are.) Eucalyptuses

 are Australian transplants that just can’t get enough of California. The unusual seedpods, spicy fragrance, and strippy bark were so much a part of my childhood that I was surprised to learn that these trees were non-native and invasive. This park has never made any claims to be a pristine native habitat, and honestly, the shade slips deliciously over us after the warmth of the hill.

We have one other major stop on this walk, and that’s Maisie’s Peak, 1100 feet above sea level. Alas, the view isn’t all that impressive. Up this high, you can see miles of suburbia at the boundaries of greenness, the cement quarry on the other side, the Moffett Field hangars all the way out, ribbons and ribbons of gray highway stretching into the distance. The wide open space seems like it goes on forever when you’re in it, but it ends all too soon.

Heading back, I see some flowers I have never seen before. (You’d think that in 12+ years, I’d have seen everything at this park, but it all changes so quickly and there are enough trails that I’m sure I miss a lot.) These big 1.5-2″ four-petaled flowers have me stumped. This is where Google images and my gads of flower guides come in. I’ll let you know when I have an answer.

This was an easy walk, no more than 2-3 miles, so we leave feeling energized and ready to take on the human world again. I hope you enjoyed our excursion!

I don’t think you need to love plants and wild things to be an environmentalist, but it’s a core part of why I care about this planet. Do you have a favorite hiking spot? What’s growing there  right now?

Looking at Trees, Part 1: Winter

Time for a confession: I don’t actually hug trees. I’m not a big hugger to start with, and trees are scratchy and unyielding. Many have ants trailing up the grooves, baby snails hatching in knots, sap dripping down in slow motion. I may not be a literal tree hugger, but I am a tree lover and an enthusiastic tree watcher.

My tree book collection has exploded in the past year with natural histories, field guides, and photography books. In the space of a year, I have started to look — really look — at trees for the first time. I was originally going to write this post in the fall, when trees still had leaves. But winter is actually a very good time to start looking at trees. Leaves can be so distracting. Without them, you can see the bones underneath and appreciate the architecture.

Precise tree identification is probably best left to the experts, but it’s actually not very hard to get started with the basics. I’d like to share a little of what I know in hopes that the boring old tree outside your window will suddenly become a lot more interesting. My earliest tree lessons came from my mother, who gave me the names to eucalyptus, liquidambar, and mulberry trees early in my childhood. I’m grateful. (Incidentally, this post is only about broad leafed trees. I’m just not that into conifers yet, other than the wonderful coastal redwoods I grew up with. Sorry.)

Looking at Branches: Opposite vs. Alternate

If you can categorize a tree as having opposite branches, you can rule out a whole lot of other possibilities. Only a few tree families have opposite branches, and there’s a handy little mnemonic to help you remember which: Damp Horse (dogwood, ash, maple, paulownia, and horse chestnut). Winter is a good time to check out whether your neighborhood trees have opposite or alternate branches. Be careful, though. While black ashes form clear, dark crosses across the sky, you’ll have to look closer with most other trees. Also, alternate trees will have the odd opposite pair, and vice  versa. If you see many pairs of opposite branches, however, you’re probably on to something.

See the way the branches grow out opposite each other to form Vs or crosses? This is an ash tree.

Looking at Fruit/Seeds

Botanists have lots of different names for different types of fruit (drupes, pomes, arils…). I don’t know all of them yet, and you really don’t need to in order to pick out several of the major tree families.

Acorns = Oak (Quercus)

Only oaks bear acorns, so if you see green acorns on a tree or brown acorns beneath one, you’re looking at an oak. Oaks are a crazily diverse family of trees. This photo shows an oak with smooth, deeply lobed leaves, but there are also oaks with sharp lobes (black oak), small spiny leaves (coast live oak), and even smooth, elongated oval leaves (holly oak). Most oaks lose their leaves in the fall, but live oaks stay green year round.

As a very rough generalization, most mature oaks are stout trees with irregular (non-symmetrical) crowns and gnarled branches and trunks.

Paired Samaras = Maple (Acer)

I probably don’t have to tell you what a maple leaf looks like, but not every tree that has maple-like leaves is actually a maple (see plane trees, next), and if that wasn’t enough, there are also maples with leaves that look like ash leaves (box elder). However, all true maples have paired sets of winged seeds, which are called samaras. They spin like helicopters when you drop them, and I’ve always thought they were an instance of awesome design by nature.

Maples include sugar, silver, and Japanese varieties. Many maples turn beautiful colors in the fall, especially on the east coast. Branches are opposite, and as far as I know, all maples are deciduous.

Soft Seed Balls = Plane Trees / Sycamores (Platanus)

 If you see a bare winter tree with camouflage like bark (big gray, white, tan, and/or orange splotches) and 1″ seed balls hanging down, especially near the top of the tree, you’re looking at some sort of plane tree (sycamores in American English). The seedballs are a little spongy and surprisingly light for their size. If you pull one open, you’ll find that it’s filled with white fluff, and the brown outside is actually formed of lots of tiny seeds packed together. They’re kind of like inside-out dandelion puffs.

Plane trees have big maple-like leaves, but good luck trying to tap one for syrup. At least in my area, they are one of the most common street trees.

Wicked Spiky Seed Balls = Sweetgum / Liquidambar (Styrax)

There are probably other trees that produce round, brown seed balls. But the sweetgum is so common and distinctive that I thought I’d point it out to you. The sweetgum has star-shaped, vaguely maple-like leaves that turn brilliant colors even in mild California autumns, and after they’re all gone, spiky seedballs hang down from the bare branches like ornaments. Unlike the plane tree’s seed balls, these are spiked all over and very hard. The seeds are dispersed through holes in the ball, leaving the spiky structure intact. These things decompose very slowly — amid the brown ones of this year, you can often see grayer, smaller seed balls of previous years.

Whew! I could go on for a while, but I don’t want to be a bore. I noticed today that some of our street trees (Bradford pears) are already putting out new buds. California trees live in a state of perpetual confusion about when they’re supposed to do what. In the spring proper, I’ll bombard you with information about flowers and leaves.

Have you ever taken a close look at your hardworking and underappreciated street trees? What kind of trees are around you?

Sustainable Travel: An Oxymoron?

Hapu'u fern on the Big Island, Hawaii

So, I’m back. For ten days I had limited phone and internet access while in a lush, remote-ish part of the Big Island, Hawai’i. I loved it. Without the internet, there was so much time. Time to sit out on the lanai (porch) in a hammock and listen to the cool green sounds of frogs, birds, insects, and rain. Time to draw, time to cook, time to read, time to learn the rhythms of the sea and wait for the incoming tide.

It was a gift, and a luxury. Our hosts were environmentally conscious, and in some ways our lives in their home were greener than they would have been at home. Our hosts were on a macrobiotic diet, so many of our meals were vegan. We drank and bathed in rain catch, a soft, sweet water that tasted and felt startlingly pure. The big water tank outside their house was a visible reminder that fresh water (though abundant on the Hilo side) was a finite resource. Every time we turned on the water, I could hear the water pump starting up, and it became a game to see how conservative I could be with my water usage. I hope that’s one habit that sticks with me in California, where water shortages are, if less visible, more urgent. We stepped lightly, bought little beyond food (and some locally made soap made by this fun indie company – yep, they use sustainable palm oil), and practiced as many of our usual habits — reusable water bottles, bags, napkins, etc. — as possible.

Sheer Cliffs & Waipi'o Valley

But I have mixed feelings about travel and sustainability. Sandra from Always Well Within probes the issue of air travel (and a sensitive one it is, too) in some depth, and she’s right to question how necessary and even moral flying is. We flew to Hawai’i, of course. Then we flew from the Big Island to Oahu for my sister’s wedding and back. And although our budget rental car was a gas-sipping Toyota Yaris, we still drove — a lot. According to the Terrapass carbon footprint calculator, that’s 2,596 pounds of carbon dioxide for the flights alone. Ouch.

I switched off my computer for the trip, but my brain continued worrying. One question in particular caught and snagged: Can traveling ever be justified from an environmental standpoint? 

The cynic that I am, I’m accustomed to thinking of ‘ecotourism’ as a form of la-di-da greenwashing. Traveling isn’t sustainable on a literal, carbon-counting level, that’s for sure. It would have been lower impact to stay at home (actually, staying home and not eating, drinking, or breathing is always the lowest impact solution), but there is something undeniably conscious-widening about travel. And not just that, but traveling to a place of incredible natural beauty renews my conviction to keep my showers short, my food local, and my footstep light. It’s about the gentlest yet most effective kick in the pants the Earth could deliver, the reminder that there is nothing– no convenience, no technology, no immediate satisfaction — that is worth balance, beauty, and the longterm viability of our planet.

Kevin photographing waves & an elusive sea turtle

I’m still not sure that benefit justifies the high costs. Traveling isn’t necessary to keep me on my toes as far as the whole green thing is concerned, and I’m not in love with traveling for the sake of traveling. Some (though not all) of my awe at the post apocalyptically barren volcano caldera could have been conveyed through video.  And even within our decision to travel, there were plenty of greener choices we could have made and didn’t. It’s always humbling how much more we could be doing, and how short we fall of even our best intentions.

As usual, I don’t have the answers. What are your thoughts on traveling and sustainability? Is it a worthwhile compromise, or a selfish extravagance?

Go take a hike.

Image credit: http://www.bahiker.com

How much time do you spend aimlessly wandering around the internet each week? A few hours? More? Don’t get me wrong; I am very appreciative that you find this blog worth aimlessly wandering around to every so often, but I’m about to suggest that you back away from the blog and go do something that will make you feel a lot more clearheaded, connected, and lucid. After you finish reading this entry, of course!

It seems obvious to me that one element of our disconnected attitude about the natural world is, well, our disconnection from the natural world. We spend, on average, 90% of our time indoors, hermetically sealed away from the outside world, which we have also modified extensively. Even when we are in a fairly undisturbed space, like a hiking preserve or open space, we no longer can tell stinging nettle from blackberry vine, finch call from robin song. Maybe we don’t even really remember how to see, hear, or smell these thngs anymore.

I’m fortunate to have a large open space within a fifteen minute drive. I visit when I can, generally at least once a month, but sometimes up to four if I’m feeling especially needy and lost. Over the years I’ve become sensitive to its seasonal changes and rhythms. Every season is my favorite when it is just beginning, but spring is especially lovely. When I’m up there, the buzzing in my head quiets, my lungs open up like doors, and the stress of living in close proximity to other people flows straight out through my shoes. It’s therapy without the couch, meditation in movement.

Inspired in part by Bill Gerlach’s recent post, I invite you to reawaken your senses this spring by going out to your nearest open space and paying attention.

Close your eyes. What can you hear? What initially seems like perfect stillness swells into a subtle symphony of birdsong all around you. Then, perhaps, you’ll begin to detect the low hum of insects, and the soft rustle of wind through leaves, a distant stream. And underneath it all, the inexorable rhythms of your own breath and heartbeat.

Take a deep breath. What do you smell? Different parts of the trail smell strikingly different. Damp earth, blackberry vines, California bay, wet rocks — down by the stream. Cool, spicy shade and the crunch of seed pods underfoot — the old eucalyptus grove. Sunlight on sweet California sage, mustard flowers — out on the open slopes.

Open your eyes. Did you ever think green could come in so many different shades? Look closely, and you might see green tips on conifers, new leafbuds unfurling like flowers on a buckeye, dewdrops on a spiderweb, whorls in a common river stone, a vibrant blue butterfly out of the corner of your eye. Everything you see is alive, or part of a system that supports life. Feel awed, humbled, and amazed that we live on such a remarkable planet.

There are lots of things you can do to be green. But nothing gives me the sense of feeling connected to the natural world, of reminding myself that its preservation matters on a deep and personal level, like taking a walking through the woods.

Is experiencing the natural world an important part of your greenness? What do you do to reconnect?