The oddest thing happened. I was on a perfectly lovely trail run near the headlands when bits of partially eaten plants and plant parts...

  I started my New Year’s resolution early, direct seeding these poppies, Papaver somniferum, in October.  I’m embarrassed to admit it, but they've been on...

Funny.  It's rare to find an artichoke gone to seed.  Typically gobbled up when cheek-pinching perfect, young and in bud.  Passing one up is...

  I've tried growing all sorts of flowers as companion plants in and near my kitchen garden. Calendula, Calendula officinalis, remains my go-to plant. They're...

The crazy, inexplicable tug of fall is here.  I love it.  In fact, I'm in a quandary.  For all my love of spring and...

There's something incredibly fascinating about opening up a dazzling green bean pod to find shades of hot pink, lavender and red mottled seeds inside. ...

Is the substance that is life simply the blur between the lines?  In fact, what happened to the lines and whatever was supposed to...

  Dr. Michael Mesler, my plant taxonomy professor at Humboldt State University, likened simplicity to parsimony.  When examining computational phylogenetics (a complicated subject) he taught...

I was seven. It was my first summer living alone with my grandmother in the coastal foothills of Sonoma County, in the place I...

Mint is aromatic, a lively addition to tea or other concoction and the bane of a garden if grown without restriction. "You have mint...