Category: Landscape
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Leaf Carpet | Orondo, WA | October 2019 Autumn Orchard #1 | Orchardists talk passionately about fruit color and quality, irrigation and pesticides, difficulties in hiring and keeping workers. But I’ve never been privy to a fruit farmer exclaiming over an orchard’s autumn colors. “It’s so darn beautiful,” the grower might say. “Those golden leaves,…
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Hills | East Wenatchee, WA | October 2019 Practical advice | Expert landscapers mostly follow principles established by Mother Nature, including repetition of plant shapes and colors. “These are known as [design] echoes and help hold the landscape together as a whole, instead of a bunch of parts,” says ag scientist Greg Grant at Texas…
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Afloat | Moses Lake, WA | October 2019 Sure, it’s easy to lose our bearings in inclement conditions — fog, smoke, blazing sun, blowing dust or snow. But sometimes all it takes is low-level spectacle — something simple, nothing astounding — to tilt our world off-kilter. Such as: echoes bouncing in a narrow canyon, pine…
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Mullein | Mazama, WA | September 2019 Mullein is my totem plant, if such a thing exists. I admire how it thrives in adverse conditions — dirt piles, roadside ditches, boulder cracks — and still maintains a stoic bearing. Herbal health websites list it as one of the top medicinal plants, able to soothe wounds…
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Crop Cellars | Quincy, WA | October 2019 You drove for two hours without the ping of curiosity that makes these jaunts worthwhile. So you did “seeing” exercises: Sought contrast (light or dark), pursued patterns (repetition or configuration) and cleared your mind of expectations. You relaxed into yin, became receptive. When the tug of engagement…
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Tree and Sky | Moses Lake, WA | September 2019 That old maple in your backyard might be making clouds, reports Popular Science magazine. Apparently, trees emit vapors that get cooked by cosmic rays (yes, from the void of space) that transform the woodsy emissions into aerosols, which are the seeds of cloud formation. Decades…
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Branch and Stem | East Wenatchee, WA | September 2019 Flora #2 | I don’t know how we connect, but we do. Maybe we’re all suspended in an emulsion — God, Tao, Mystery, Spirit or Love — that promotes contact. Maybe each of us is an expression of the force that spins galaxies and turns…
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Peaks | Washington Pass, WA | September 2019 Last week I joined two bus loads of German tourists to watch in reverence as sunbeams played across the face of the Liberty Bell Group. (That’s Liberty Bell Mountain on the right, Early Winters Spires on the left.) It’s not easy to muffle 120 chittering travelers —…
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Early Morning Walk | Twisp, WA | September 2019 Long shadows remind us that the Earth spins. Low-angle light peeks over hills as we all rotate eastward, sunward, from dim to blinding bright. Right now we’re center-stage, spindly and clownish, but not for long. Our place in the universe shifts continuously as cosmic forces interplay.…
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