Category: Landscape
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Basalt | Electric City, WA | July 2019 Landscape Week | Life here is built atop basalt. A layer lies just beneath our grocery store’s parking lot. Our dog-walking trail runs between basalt escarpments. Chunks of it accent our home’s landscaping. Roughly 15 million years ago the earth cracked open and released lava flows that…
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Shadow | Harrington, WA | July 2019 Landscape Week | Lin Yutang, the Chinese writer and philosopher (d. 1976), often wrapped the profound in the practical. Such as, “When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set.” This double-edged wisdom describes sundown, of course, but also
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Outcrop | Palisades, WA | July 2019 Landscape Week | I recently watched this basalt outcrop shed pieces of itself. Outside forces shifted mass, loosened foundations, cracked pillars. Big and little chunks tumbled. The minor avalanche was a good reminder that what’s solid today might not be tomorrow. In our own lives, of course, the…
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Storm | Twisp, WA | May 2019 Landscape Week | Memory has little respect for spectacle. As I watch an approaching storm (in photo), complete with high winds and lightning, my attention goes to a patch of reeds. They’re similar to those that cowboys (including John Wayne) used for air tubes in Hollywood westerns. Our…
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Riverbank | East Wenatchee, WA | July 2019 Landscape Week | Trees don’t always know which way to grow. Conditions change; needs shift. What seems a direct path towards light becomes blocked, then dims, and a new route emerges. Problem is: Every leaf in the forest faces that same direction, every branch reaches upward to…
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Crop Line | Colfax, WA | June 2019 Landscape Week | Farming feeds us in more ways than one. Land transfigured — harrow through harvest — often emerges as unintended art. Tractor tracks, crop rows, sweeps of brown, green and (later) gold. Sure, form follows
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Kayaker | Lake Wenatchee, WA | July 2019 Boaters moving away from shore always seem courageous. Watching them leave land to float across a fluid world — a dangerous alien environment — ranks high, I think, on a list of history’s heart-rending moments. Such as: A husband’s schooner disappears over the horizon. A warrior’s canoe…
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Fence | Odessa, WA | June 2019 Dad liked making improvements. So one summer he sent my brother and me to build a damn fence across our 10-acre field. Sweaty work for two pre-teen boys. We soon developed a combative relationship with our post hole digger. We dreamed at night about barbed wire (the stretching,…
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Root Ball | Lake Wenatchee, WA | July 2019 It’s not until the stately cedar tree falls that we realize the complexity of its existence. The simple elegance of trunk and boughs were supported and maintained by roots deep and entangled. In fact, the tree’s downfall may have resulted from tubers working at cross purposes,…
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Morning with Tree | Steptoe, WA | June 2019 Light and shadow, shape and color are all that’s required to awaken wonder. Sure, it’s nice to soak up the splendor of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, but spectacle can also be found
IrwinFoto 