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Local ecology is undergoing style changes. Posts made between February and July 18, 2008 will remain here for an undetermined amount of time. Newer posts are available here for reading and commenting. Thank you for your patience.

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Marie Winn’s fascination with the birds of New York is are told in her books “Red-Tails in Love” and “Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife.” Winn and others track and observe screech owls, orioles, and moths among other wildlife in Central Park, at night. If I lived in New York I would be a participant in these moon- and ambient-light lit adventures!

Birding also happens in Prospect Park (Brooklyn), Pelham Bay Park (Bronx), and Forest Park and Alley Pond Park (Queens). New York Times reporters Anne Raver (she writes engrossing essays column in the Home & Garden section) and Katherine Zoepf offer some online for birders: the blog, Urban Hawks; nycadubon.prg; prospectpark.org/calendar/audubon_center_events; and Sibley and Peterson field guides.

Closer to home, the East Bay Regional Park District offers “Tuesdays for the Birds” bird walks in its regional parks. The next walk is scheduled for July 22, 7 to 9:30 a.m. in Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline. Bethany Facendini will lead the walk; call 510-525-2233 for the meeting place. The park district hosts additional birding programs: Thursday Birding; Wonderful World of Water Birds; Bike ‘n Bird; Biking, Botanizing, and Birding the Bay; and Family Birdwalk!.

Source: Wiki Commons

In her article, Times reporter, Katherine Zoepf, mentioned a birder’s life list. A life list is “a list of all the bird species [a birder has] identified with absolute certainty during [her or his] whole lifetime of serious birding.” As a novice birder my life list is short but it does have a “good bird” on it: a yellow-billed kite seen from a canoe in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. I fell out of the canoe while peering at the kite.

The large and small of animal art in U.S. cities.

Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, Calif.

Fulton Street, Berkeley

Addison Street, Berkeley

Denver, Colorado

Byers Evans Museum, Denver

Public library, Denver

Seattle, Washington (one of the Pigs on Parade, 2007)

Finally, it’s not quite art, and I think Boston’s duck and swan boats are more creative, but here’s Toronto’s water tour vehicle:

St. George Street

Several weeks ago we took a six-day trip to Toronto (and Niagara Falls), Canada. My first photograph in the city was of plants and people. I was struck by the simplicity of this landscape feature: a tight allee of birches, a grove, between a last century modern building and traditional brick construction. Another interesting architectural-landscape combination is pictured below, also on St. George Street.

The birches were sighted on a walk after dropping our bags at a friend’s apartment in the Bloor/University neighborhood. We visited the Bata Shoe Museum. I was taken by the small sizes of the adult Chinese shoes on exhibit; the women who wore them had bound feet.

Of the neighborhoods I explored, my favorite is The Annex. Respected urbanist, Jane Jacobs, lived in The Annex. (I will be writing about Jacobs’s advice for park and neighborhood development in a future post.)

The Annex is also home to the Ecology Park Community Garden which we discovered at the end of our first walk. The park and its stewards will be featured in a nature-made profile. Briefly, the park began as a staging ground for subway expansion but now features plant associations found in the original Taddle Creek watershed and in southern Ontario.

The generous tree lawns within The Annex neighborhood, like the one pictured above on Madison Avenue and adjacent to the Ecology Park, also contribute to an improved watershed. Less impervious surface means less runoff. Larger soil zones support healthier and larger trees; tree canopies intercept, slow, and clean rainfall (and moderate air temperature, store carbon, and filter air pollutants). In addition, if the soil within the tree lawns is uncompacted and pervious, it can absorb rainfall directly as well as indirectly via throughfall (water falling through the canopy) and stem flow (water flowing down the trunk), further preventing runoff and improving the hydrological cycle.

The hydrological cycle of the Taddle Creek watershed has been severely disrupted. The University of Toronto buried the creek in the late 1880s (?). The landscape design within the original creek bed does not appear to use a creek-friendly plant palette. Furthermore, the drainage system, pictured below, appears to follow a more industrial-era model of storm-water management.

Alfred Holden, editor of Taddle Creek Magazine, wrote an interesting essay on the history of the creek. Lost Rivers, an organization that “create[s] an appreciation of the city’s intimate connection to its water systems, by tracing the courses of forgotten streams,” has posted a map of the creek sections on its website.

Green (unripe) ginkgo fruit

One day last summer on a stroll down 66th Avenue in Oakland, a smell brought me back to a short street (one block) in the South End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, lined with a single tree species. The smell and the tree: the ripe fruit of the female ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba). It was pungent; for me, a cross between a rotten apricot and vomit. Ginkgo derives from two Japanese words: “gin” meaning silver and “koo” or “kyoo” meaning apricot. (Biloba refers to the double-lobed leaf.)

A recent essay in the New Yorker about ginkgos in New York City also brought me back to the afore-mentioned street in Boston. The article reports about a group of three youth, known as the Anti-Ginkgo Tolerance Group, who urge “citizens to call 311 if they encountered the smelly seeds.” In my capacity as street tree program manager for the Boston Parks Department, I was once asked if the city would remove several ginkgos. Neighbors - at least the resident with whom I met - did not like the smell nor the fruit litter on the sidewalk. It is worth noting that the ginkgos in questions were at least 10 inches in diameter at breast height. A ginkgo grows slowly. An aside: Tonawanda Street in Dorchester, Boston, Mass. has beautiful, mature ginkgos.

I explained to the South End resident that the City only removes dead or hazardous trees in keeping with the Massachusetts General Law which gives municipalities tree warden power. In addition to the legislative rule, I offered practical advice. I mentioned that the fruit releases its odor when it is bruised or crushed (triggering the decay process), so the malodor could be mitigated by harvesting the fruit. Neither piece of information satisfied the resident. Unfortunately I could not contact a harvesting group. At that time in Boston, there were no organizations that coordinated street-tree fruit harvests; there still are no such organizations to my knowledge. (However, EarthWorks Projects harvests fruit from urban wilds and schoolyard orchards.)

Many cities no longer plant the female ginkgo. I think this is unfortunate. Street trees potentially embody functional ecology (ecosystem services) and food production. I would guess that more city dwellers have access to a street tree than to a yard. I derive great pleasure from picking and eating the plums from the street trees in my neighborhood, but unlike a plum tree, a ginkgo is long lived and large statured, thus providing more benefits for a longer period.

Plant female ginkgos and harvest their fruits! The ginkgo nut is edible: “both a prized delicacy and an invaluable food for long life…throughout Asia” according to the New England Ecology Garden. The nuts, roasted, “make a tasty snack,” according to Flordata.com and Lucy at the Nourish Me blog offers a ginkgo nut custards recipe. Note: some people are sensitive to the pulp; also, the extract can be toxic.

Donning a Green Collar, Boston Globe

Amid the uncertainty, there’s a growing movement among community organizations, environmental groups, unions, and workforce development agencies to pinpoint what jobs will become available and how to get people into them. The goal is to create “green-collar” jobs that would provide those often shut out of new job opportunities - such as people of color, the poor, at-risk youth, the underemployed, the unemployed, and the formerly incarcerated - the training necessary to compete for positions in the burgeoning field.

Wings & a Prayer, Boston Globe North

Scientists aren’t sure where the Plum Island contamination is coming from, but they do know that other species around the country with high mercury levels, such as loons, produce fewer offspring. Roughly 95 percent of the world’s saltmarsh sparrows breed in the Northeast, where mercury contamination is among the highest in the nation. Because the sparrows spend their lives in the marsh, essentially unable to escape the pollution, scientists believe the elevated amounts of mercury found in these tiny birds may be a harbinger for many other species that also depend on the wetlands.

With Gas Over $4, Cities Explore Whether It’s Smart to Be Dense, Wall Street Journal

For decades, backers of “smart-growth” planning principles have preached the benefit of clustering the places where people live more closely with the businesses where they work and shop. Less travel would mean less fuel consumption and less air pollution. Several communities built from scratch upon those principles, such as Celebration in Florida, sprouted across the country. But they were often isolated experiments, connected to their surroundings mainly by car. So, as gasoline remained cheap, the rest of the country continued its inexorable march toward bigger houses and longer commutes.

Now, smart-growth fans see a chance to reverse that.

“Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did,” predicts David Mogavero, a Sacramento-based architect and smart-growth proponent.

Hale Street, Beverly, Mass.

Pin oak, Oak Street

Hackensack is named for the Achkinheshcky tribe; Achkinheshcky was simplified to Hackensack. The tribe settled at the mouth of the Hackensack River. The city is the seat of Bergen County; the county was once covered with farms, many of which, along with orchards, were located along the river (see History of Hacksensack).

The river runs east of the Fairmount neighborhood which has several tree-named streets: Elm Avenue, Poplar Avenue, Pine Street, Cedar Avenue, Catalpa Avenue, Willow Avenue, and Oak Street. A search of the online history book of Hackensack revealed the names of several creeks and brooks. I was told that many of these smaller bodies of water have been buried. Coles Brooks (pictured above), a tributary of the river, runs north of Coles Avenue remains in its natural state. Perhaps the tree-named streets in Fairmount are an homage to a lost, more extensive riparian landscape.

An after-breakfast walk took us past a nineteenth-century Dutch farmhouse on Valley Road, a creek on Robin Hood Road, and a block of McCosh Road planted with seven species of (street) trees. In the aerial above, the farmhouse is outlined in yellow, the creek in blue, and the block of trees in green.

The creek - whose name I have been unable to find - is located in Watershed Management Area 4 of the Passaic River watershed in New Jersey. The creek runs perpendicular to Robin Hood Road in the first block east of Valley Road. The first indications that there was water were a thick line of trees (riparian zone) and a bridge railing along the sidewalk, pictured above.

We discovered the farmhouse between a shaded block of McCosh and the creek. The nineteenth-century house and garden are a museum - Hamilton House Museum - set amongst single-family houses, Montclair State University, and municipal playing fields. The house was moved to its present location in 1973; its current footprint is significantly smaller than the original 96-acre homestead. The museum is open for tours on Sunday afternoons. Click here to see a photograph of another farm in Clifton; Ploch’s Farm has been in operation since 1867.

In other farm news, I noticed a sign with the following slogan - “Save the Garden State, Keep the NJ Dept of Ag” - at a local nursery. New Jersey governor Corzine’s 2008-2009 budget calls for the elimination of the Department of Agriculture among other state agencies. The numbers: the New York Times reported that the state needs to make $2.7 million in cuts and the elimination of the agriculture department would save $500,000. Blog PolitickerNJ.com reported that the agricultural industry is state’s third largest revenue source at $82 million behind pharmaceuticals and tourism.

Farms are only one aspect of the garden in the “Garden State.” I have observed a variety of sidewalk canopy conditions in various Jersey towns including the block of McCosh Road pictured above. We counted seven tree species: Pin oak (number 4), Callery pear, Littleleaf linden, American linden (number 3), Norway maple (number 1), Red maple, and London planetree (number 2).

Not only is the planting strip narrower on the west side of the block, but there are overhead utility wires. Unfortunately, large stature trees like the Norway maple and Callery pear have been planted beneath the wires. An example of poor pruning techniques and the conflict between wires and large trees is shown in the photograph below (which was taken on McCosh).

Callery pear (background); young Norway maple (foreground)

For a discussion of streetscape design, read “A Tall Order—Large Stature Trees” and “Street Trees: Let’s Think Outside the Wires,” both available at Human Flower Project (search “Georgia").

69 Albany Street, The Annex, Toronto
A full-length post about Jane and her neighborhood will follow in July.

June 21 is the summer solstice and the official start of summer but the presence of linden flowers is a good sign that summer is already here. The flowers bloom “for about two weeks, when spring turns to summer,” according to Plotnick in The Urban Tree Book. The linden (genus Tilia) pictured above is not a littleleaf (T. cordata) or a silver linden (T. tomentosa), common lindens on the streets of Boston where I worked as an urban forester. I think it is a bigleaf linden or T. platyphyllos.

The leaves of the lindens tend to be heart shaped with imperfect – lopsided – bases. The leaves end in long points, a perfect design for directing water to the root zone. The lindens also grow a second type of leaf known as a bract, a “more or less modified leaf situated near a flower or inflorescence” (H.D. Harrington in How to Identify Plants). The bracts frame the lindens’ flowers (pictured above).
Both the flowers and leaves of the linden offer something sweet. The sap produced in the leaves attract aphids who greedily drink too much and excrete it on the leaves and anything below the canopy of the tree. Many animals benefit from this excreted sap; ants, flies, and moths eat it as well as “a sooty mold that blackens the leaf” (A. Plotnick).

Plotnick describes the perfume of the linden’s flowers as “a floral mist” that is “diffused…through the neighborhood.” The flowers are complete; they have sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils. Bees pollinate the flowers, but there is a price to be paid for the abundance of flowers, pollen, and nectar. Plotnick writes that silver and Crimean lindens produce a toxic substance that seems to be concentrated in pollen. Bumblebees tend to eat pollen. Honeybees extract nectar which is less toxic. Cultivated linden honey is “sold as a delicacy and used in liqueurs.” The flowers are also steeped to make an herbal infusion – tilleul – in France.

I’ve written about the genus Aesculus on this blog. The ones that grow along Adeline Street near the Berkeley Bowl are horsechestnut or A. hippocastanum. I am most familiar with this species; there were several in front of the parks department building when I worked in Boston. During my time there one was killed by an errant driver. The horsechestnut flowers have peaked but the California buckeye’s (A. californica) flowers are still in bloom. The tree pictured above grows north of the alumni house on the UC campus. There is a buckeye growing as a street tree on Parker Street at Dana in the Le Conte neighborhood.

The buckeye, like the horsechestnut, has a palmate leaf (spread apart your fingers for a rough visual aid) but its leaves are narrower than those of the horsechestnut. There are three types of palmate gemoetry: divided, parted, and compound. The leaves of the genus Aesculus are compound.

On to the flowers. If the branch structure of the buckeye is like a candelabrum (A. Plotnick), then the flowers are its lights! In fact, Plotnick writes that buckeyes and horeschestnuts are refered to as “candle trees.” The geometry of the floral cluster is a thyrse described by H.D. Harrington as “a cylindrical or ovoid-pyramidal, usually densely flowered panicle on the order of a cluster of grapes or a lilac inflorescence.” There are 100 – 200 blossoms per thyrse and like the linden, the smell is intoxicating. The smell is described by A. Plotnick as “a soapy summery aroma.” Plotnick provides a description of the complexities of floral design:

The individual flowers could not be more gracefully structured or inviting. Examine them closely. Pollen sacs are extended on long wiry filaments. A sweet nectar lures pollen spreaders along the female parts. Color makrings on the petals provide ‘honey guides’ for the clueless. And when the sweet stuff is used up, the petals undergo color changes from yellow to orange and carmine, signaling, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. VISIT OUR OTHER FINE BLOSSOMS (p. 244).

Like the linden, the horsechestnut and buckeye are toxic, but in this case it is the seed not the flower, and the toxicity is towards humans, not bees. The horsechestnut has been confused with the American chestnut, Castanea dentata, which is related to beeches (genus Fagus), native to the eastern U.S. , and was decimated by an Asian fungus between 1904 and the 1930s (A. Plotnick). The chestnut seed is edible but not the horsechestnut or buckeye seed. The latter contains a substance known as esculin “that destroys red blood cells” when ingested; esculin can be extracted via boiling (A. Plotnick).

Source: Forestry Images, Univ. of Georgia, Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources

The common names – horsechestnut and buckeye – were derived from “associations with horses,” according to Plotnick. For example, the buckeye’s seed resembles the eye of a horse because of the helium – “the scar where the seed broke away from the fruit” (H.D. Harrington) – which resembles an iris. Also, the leaf scar (where the leaf was attached to the stem) resembles a horseshoe (pictured above).

The above photograph was taken on June 11, at approximately 1 p.m., on the UC campus. The previous day, the fountain at Bancroft and Berkeley, several feet away from the lawn in the photo (see steps in the background), was overflowing. The overflow might have been related to the construction project at the law school to the east. I do not think the June 11 lawn watering was the result of a mechanical malfunction. At 3 p.m. on the same day, I noticed that the lawn in front of Hearst Gym on Bancroft had been watered - the grass was covered with water drops, glistened in the sun, and the sidewalk was wet.

East Bay Municipal Utility District (or EBMUD) is enforcing a mandatory water rationing rule. EBMUD has set water use reduction goals for various users; the required water use reduction for institutions is 9%.

California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, declared a statewide drought last week, on June 5. The governor “called for a 20 percent reduction in water use statewide and urged local agencies to bolster conservation programs and to work with federal and other authorities to help farmers who are suffering huge financial losses and abandoning crops in droves” (San Francisco Chronicle).

left, Cedar Rapids, IA (source: sfgate.com)
right, Camache Reservoir, east of Lodi, CA (source: EBMUD)

While cities and states in the Midwest are grappling with the effects of torrential rain and resulting floods, the Bay Area, though experiencing cooler weather than earlier this week, is still in a drought and water conservation requires our “extra efforts” after two successive dry winters (EBMUD).

Worries Mount as Farmers Push for Big Harvest

Last winter, as the full scope of the global food crisis became clear, commodity prices doubled or tripled, provoking grumbling in America, riots in two dozen countries and the specter of greatly increased malnutrition.

State-grown Tomatoes OK, but Warning Widens

…leery shoppers seem to be redirecting some of their tomato shopping away from supermarkets and toward farmers’ markets, where most produce is grown locally in small batches.

Growers nationwide urged health officials to speed up their investigation into the origins of the salmonella, before massive quantities of tomatoes that are awaiting sale end up rotting.

Is Bamboo Flooring Actually Good for the Environment?

Don’t automatically assume that bamboo is the environmental winner, especially if there’s a locally sourced, FSC-certified hardwood option. If you are tempted by bamboo, don’t settle for the salesman’s patter about his product’s wonders—get in touch with the manufacturer and inquire about how the source material is raised and harvested. Some of the greenest bamboo doesn’t come from monoculture plantations but, rather, from operations such as Madagascar Bamboo, which harvests naturally occurring plants from the edges of farms.

Banking on Gardening

“I’m hoping to take $20 a week off my grocery bill,” she said. This is in the low range, according to Mr. Ball, who says a $100 investment will produce $1,000 to $1,700 worth of vegetables.

Loyal to Its Roots

The sea rocket, researchers report, can distinguish between plants that are related to it and those that are not. And not only does this plant recognize its kin, but it also gives them preferential treatment.

If the sea rocket detects unrelated plants growing in the ground with it, the plant aggressively sprouts nutrient-grabbing roots. But if it detects family, it politely restrains itself.

Guerrilla Gardening (need Times account to access the article)

Yet aside from a few tomatoes and some Swiss chard, which he says “tasted dirty,” Reynolds has never grown any food. Nor is he too tied to gardening as an ecological act, a way of restoring nature’s order; he gladly plants invasive species if they’re aesthetically appropriate to the setting. Instead, he seems to focus on guerrilla gardening as a socially subversive phenomenon, breaking us out of the unconstructive role we’ve cast ourselves in as citizens.

Tour participants creekside, University Village, Albany

The Cordonices Creek bike tour co-sponsored by Sustainable Pacific Rim Cities and Cycles of Change was held this Saturday with fourteen participants. Grey of Cycles of Change led the tour with help from me. We met at Berkeley BART at 10 a.m. and rode uphill to Cordonices Park where we parked our bikes and walked to the waterfall. After a brief guided meditation at the fall, we biked to several more sections of the creek at the Beth El Synagogue, at Live Oak Park, at Albina Street near St. Mary’s College High School, at two places in University Village in Albany (the first of which was a restoration by EcoCity Builders), and finally, where the creek meets the bay at the Albany Mudflats Ecological Preserve. The preserve was the official end of the tour but several of us continued to Albany Bulb.

The next bike tour will be held on July 5 and will tour gardens, parks, and water features in Oakland and Berkeley. The full schedule can be downloaded here.

Sign at the Beth El section of the creek

St. Mary’s section - note the cascading pools design; steelhead trout were first spotted in this section of the creek.

University Village (section 1) - note remnants of the deconstructed culvert

Sign in orchard located in the floodplain of the creek

University Village (section 2)

This is the Marin Creek outfall. The Cordonices Creek outfall is slightly northwest of this location. The creek meets the bay

Slough and protected mudflats

Cairn at Albany Bulb

Albany Bulb

For a photographic timeline of the most recent restoration of the creek (at University Village), click here.

To participate in creeks restoration at the grassroots level, contact Friends of Five Creeks.

Taken on June 4, 2008

Nature making profiles is the signature project of local ecology. We have written three profiles, are working on a fourth, and are traveling to Toronto to see more.

There are several styles of nature making. The sites we have profiled thus far (and the ones we are primarily interested in) were designed by neighborhood residents. These nature made sites are “introduced patches” (see Forman and Gordon, 1986) of intended ecological succession versus purely ecological infrastructure patches (like the California Academy of Sciences green roof) or traditional restorations of remnant “spontaneous nature” (Mozingo, 2007).

The roof is in the background of the photograph - note the rolling “hills.”

I saw the California Academy of Sciences green roof from the de Young Museum tower and from ground level. The roof’s outline is impressive but the design details became obvious only after reviewing the Good magazine article about the roof. The roof is engineered to mimic the function of ground cover plant systems. This type of green roof is “extensive” and is characterized by shallow planting depths (versus “intensive” roofs with deep soil depths that can support shrubs and trees). Despite the shallow nature of the soil and the short layer of the plant material, the CAS green roof will intercept rainfall - keeping it out of storm drains - as well as regulate seasonal building temperature.

In a 14-month study of the rainfall interception rates of green roofs, Michigan State University researchers at the Green Roof Research Project observed that extensive roofs “retained 60.6% of rainfall from [83 experimental rainfall events] compared to 50.4% and 27.2% for the media-only and conventional gravel ballast roofs, respectively.”

I am always amazed by Berkeley’s lack of rainfall interception landscapes and storm-water best management practices. My street floods during heavy rainfall and most of it flows into storm drains. EBMUD has implemented mandatory rationing this summer because of low precipitation levels this past winter. I think we did not do a good job of storing the rain we did receive. I am a renter so I cannot install a green roof, but if you are a house owner, consider installing, at least, an extensive green roof in combination with a rain barrel or cistern. For more information, visit the following Web sites:

Nine Mile Run Rain Barrel Initiative; Best Management Practices for Low Impact Development; Low Impact Development - Stormwater - Rain Barrels & Cisterns; and Great Lakes WATER Institute Green Roof Project.

For a local example of a small-scale green roof/living roof, visit the EcoHouse in the Westbrae neighborhood.

Tuliptree, bird of paradise, bottlebrush. Common names of commonly seen plants in Berkeley. The names derive from the appearance of each plant. The flowers of the tuliptree, Liriodendron tulipfera, look like tulips. The bird-of-paradise flower, Strelitzia genus, resembles the bird of paradise (Paradisaeidae family). Obviously the flower of the bottlebrush tree, Callistemon genus, resembles a bottle brush.

The 16th century name for the ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) was ya-chio-tzu which means “a tree with leaves like a duck’s foot,” according to Arthur Plotnick in The Urban Tree Book.

Two common names for the catalpa (Catalpa speciosa), which I have not seen in Berkeley, are derived from the appearance of the plant’s seed pod: cigar tree and Indian bean tree. I think the pods, pictured below, look like a green bean or vanilla bean.

Source: USDA Plants Database

Another tree with a common name derived from the appearance of its fruit is the sycamore or planetree, which is commonly planted in Berkeley. The tree is known as buttonball tree. Each button ball or fruit is an “aggregate of achenes.” An achene is a “small dry, -1-celled, 1-seeded indehiscent fruit, the seed attached to the pericarp at 1 place” (Harrington, How to Identify Plants). If the tree has one seed ball per stalk, then it is an American sycamore versus the London planetree which would have two or three seed balls per stalk.

Broken hydrant on Bancroft Avenue
The firefighters who shut off the hydrant from a manhole in the street received a hearty round of applause from the crowd.

The Ecology Center in Berkeley is a great resource for many things eco, from reference books to housewares, from posters to playing cards like the ones pictured above. These six cards are from a deck titled “Local Birds - Northern California Backyard and Trail Birds.” The six species pictured on the cards are commonly seen in my backyard.

I have not done anything special to attract these species. All the plants in the backyard where there when I moved into the duplex four years ago. I have added new plants to the front and side yards. I borrowed a book from the library about attracting birds, but it is not useful for the Bay Area; it’s perfect for folks living in the Prairies or on the Atlantic seaboard. I turned to my personal copy of American Wildlife & Plants, a text I have mentioned several times on this blog.

The list of cultivated and wild plants visited by hummingbirds in warmer parts of the U.S. and on the Pacific seaboard are numerous, so I will only list the ones with which I am familiar:

Butterflybush (a favorite of butterflies, hence the name)
Sage (which I planted in the side yard)
Lemon (my neighbor has a tree)
Geranium (I planted several in the front yard)
Hollyhock (my seeds have not germinated)
Horsechestnut (no trees on my street)
Rose (there is a pink rose in the backyard)

The wild plants include manzanita and milkweed (I plant to sow seeds of the latter in the fall).

Last week the backyard was visited by many House Finches. Its red crown stripe and specked belly are good markers. In California, filaree makes up at least 50% of the house finch’s diet. Filaree is classified as a “weed plant” and Martin et al. note that the finch’s “main diet consists of weed seeds.” In my backyard they eat buds.

The Cedar Waxwing is one of my favorite songbirds. I love the soft yellow color of its belly as well as its crown tuft. Waxwings, also known as cedarbirds, consume mostly fleshy fruits which in the Pacific are from the California peppertree, cultivated cherry and grape, mistletoe and strawberry. The waxwings also eat animals like beetles, ants, caterpillars, grasshoppers, and crickets.

I think I’ve seen a Chestnut-backed Chickadee, but according to Martin et al., the chestnut-backed chickadee is “found in relatively wild, timbered tracts” which my backyard is not. Joseph Grinnell and Margaret W. Wyth did sporadically observe Santa Cruz Chestnut-backed Chickadees in their 1926 (!) publication, Birds of Berkeley Campus).

I’ve definitely seen the Song Sparrow though it’s less common than the first four birds described above. Martin et al. describe it as “the commonest, best-known and most loved songster in the United States. It is nearly equally at home in town or in country.” Although the bird is shy it eats in the open; it eats animals (beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, caterpillars, and ants - there are a lot of ants in my yard!) and plants which in California include pigweed (10-25% of its diet), knotweed, and minerslettuce.

I’ll close this Bird Watch with a quote from Suburban Safari about hummingbird physiology:

Like tiny bears, they slow their breathing and depress their heart rate from 1,000 beats per minute to just 150. On a cold spring morning like this [Holmes is writing about her yard in Maine], my hummers may need fifteen minutes to power up to flying temperature (13).

The Neighborhood History Hunt Game designed by Gingi Fulcher took approximately 90 minutes to complete at a leisurely walking pace. The deadline for submission was May 19, but if you can get a copy of the hunt, I recommend doing the walk. Please note that in this post I do not present the items in the order given on the game form nor do I include all the clues and factoids on the game form.

I enjoyed searching for items in the hunt, but my favorite part of the game was discovering items not on the official hunt, like the checkered stepping stone in the tree lawn at 1806 Allston, pictured above. A few of the clues were located in the ground which I liked. For example, two of the last clues were found on utility covers, one at MLK and Haste and the other in the Civic Center Park.

The first item on the hunt was the Rainbow Ranch Cafe at MLK and Allston, pictured above. It used to be Robin’s Sandwich Shop. Down the street from the cafe is a statue in memory of Sgt. Jimmie H. Rutledge. Adjacent to the police station is the former City Hall which is now the headquarters for Berkeley Unified School District. Around the corner on Allston is the City Hall Annex which used to house the Department of Milk Inspection, pictured below.

In addition to clues, the hunt game form also provided neighborhood factoids like the presence of two large redwoods that have been growing in the neighborhood for at least 70 years! The fourth item on the hunt was a lemon tree in the front yard of what used to be the site of S.J. Sill’s house and stables. The current house was moved to 2208 McKinley from its location on 4th Street in 1979.

The railroad remnant at 2341 Roosevelt led to my discovery of a metal bunny sculpture, a metal woman sculpture, and a side yard of metal sculptures! Not far from the railroad object, on California, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company ran service from 1912-1933. Another sculpture - the ballerina figure at the Creative Arts Building - was a clue to item 10.

Energy was the theme for one of the items and one of the factoids. The item was the house that uses sunlight for interior lighting (via roof windows) and power (via solar panels). At 2423 McGee, I saw two electric vehicles or EVs. Gingi Fulcher noted that the vehicles were manufactured by a now defunct company Jet Industries between 1977 and 1981. Another factoid provided by Gingi is that electric engine technology is older than the internal combustion engine.

One of the last factoids on the game form related to architectural design. Two “classic examples” of Eastern Shingle Cottage style houses are located at 1733 (pictured below) and 1715 Dwight Way.

The houses at 2411 and 2409 MLK were not on the game form but they are so pretty. They remind me of icing on cupcakes.

Finally, on the other end of the spectrum in terms of design and aesthetics is the New Green/ECO building at MLK and Dwight. The building was not on the game form, but I have long been intrigued with its details, pictured below.

Yes, this book, whose cover features a squirrel on a patch of green lawn, holds insights about energy and water.

I highly recommend Suburban Safari by Hannah Holmes, pictured above. Here are a two excerpts related to landscape and energy. It’s unusually hot in the East Bay and we are on the cusp of summer water rationing, so Hannah Holmes’s observations and well-researched findings are salient!

…the flood-irrigated neighborhood where we began our tour was cool and shady, wasn’t it? That shade keeps the entire city a little cooler. And those water-hog trees, grasses, and shrubs cycle water much faster than desert plants do, and that evaporation cools the city even more. So which would you have? More water use and less air-conditioner use? Or less water use and more AC? A water shortage, or fossil-fuel smoke in the air? Chris chuckles. Heh heh. He has no easy answer. However, the university owns a plot of Phoenix houses and plans to landscape them three different ways to compare the effects. Not that Chris expects science to change anyone’s mind about his or her lawn (p. 127).

Nothing ’s clear with energy and ecology….Grass, like most plants, cools itself, and the air around it, by releasing moisture. Measuring the effectiveness of this trick is as easy as stepping barefoot from the lawn to the street on a hot day. A thirty-degree difference isn’t uncommon. The contrast is strongest after sunset, when the grass cools quickly but the street throbs late into the night. All this cooling around the house reduces the amount of air-conditioning we need indoors. Grass is even better than trees than trees at the evaporative-cooling business. (Trees win overall because their shade prevents sunlight from soaking the city in the first place.) (p. 116).

Surprised by the previous statement? According to Dr. Cynthia E. Rosenzweig at NASA, “all else being equal,” there is a small difference in the urban heat island effect in going from impervious cover to grass versus going from impervious cover to trees. On the other hand, in a city like Manhattan with more area to plant sidewalk trees, street tree planting is a more effective strategy than planting trees in open space, i.e. parks composed of lawn and widely-spaced trees.

If you are considering planting vegetation to capture the “evaporative-cooling” effect, consider water-conserving plants in light of the water shortage in the Bay Area. EBMUD (East Bay Municipal Utility District) has over 100 pages of water-conserving plants from trees to ferns in its publication, Water-Conserving Plants and Landscapes for the Bay Area (1990). I purchased my copy used at Black Oak Books in North Berkeley. Remember though, plants, even natives, require regular watering in their first year to establish well.

If you are unmoved by the “evaporative-cooling” effect of the lawn, alternative grasses, recommended by EMBUD, include California fescue, blue oat grass, zebra grass, deer grass, fountain grass, and needle grass (view a purple needle grass). Chamomile and moss verbena, of the ground covers, seemed most suitable for recreation, “the lawn’s least debatable benefit” according to Holmes. Planting dwarf sedge in an “urban forest” garden is recommended by the U.S. Forest Service.

Suburban Safari is available in our bookshop. Proceeds from the bookshop will support our efforts to document citizen nature makers.

Ecological design titles in the bookshop include

Could parking space become the next living space? asked Elsa Brenner of the New York Times in an article of the same name. Brenner wrote of a Westchester County Department of Planning study that proposes to increase housing for moderate-income households by building on office park parking lots. Brenner, quoting from the study, notes that office parks, constructed with roads and utilities, lower development costs on these sites.

Where do trees fit? Well, the article (I am really enjoying my Times subscription) reminded me of photographs I took of the North Berkeley and Ashby BART parking lots. I’d like to share some thoughts about both lots. First, note the large stature trees, pictured below, that provide visual privacy between the North Berkeley station and houses to its west. Also note the small stature trees, pictured above, in the expanse of asphalt on the western side of the North Berkeley BART station. Then, compare the shade profile of a short stature tree, in this case, a purple leaf plum to that of a larger stature tree, a sweetgum (photo below). Importantly, the sweetgum is not at its mature size.

My look at the two BART station was not a compare and contrast exercise. I did not photograph the western parking at Ashby BART which more closely resembles the North Berkeley station. I did photograph the eastern lot at Ashby which has remarkable trees, pictured below.

_________________________________________________________

Spring has definitely arrived. In its earlier days I meant to post about buds, leaves and flowers. Better late than never. The following material is quoted from two of my favorite botany books: Botany for Gardeners by Harold William Rickett and Trees: Their Natural History by Peter Thomas.

This is a bud. This complex structure, beautifully and symmetrically formed of successively overlapping young leaves and including the apical meristem of a stem-all this is comprised in that simple three-letter word. Any bud is potentially a length of stem with the leaves that will adorn it. As the cells lengthen, forming a region of elongation, the leaves which were at first so close-packed at the tip become separated. The cells which were once included in the shirt, broad meristem of the apex now form the length of stem beneath the tip; and leaves which were once crowded on the apex are now attached on the sides of this length of stem, often at wide intervals.

Buds of different trees vary in just how much of the next year’s growth is preformed. In fact buds can be divided into three types of growth. In trees such as ashes, beech, hornbeams, oaks, hickories, walnuts, horse chestnuts and many maples and conifers, the whole of next year’s shoot is preformed. Everything is preformed or fixed in the bud as it develops over the summer to be expanded into a branch the following spring. These species are described as showing fixed or determinate growth. Since everything is preformed, spring growth occurs in a single, rapid flush and is over in just ten days to a few weeks, and then the terminal bud takes on its winter appearance.

In many others, however, only some of the leaves are preformed….Trees showing this free or indeterminate growth (sometimes called continuous growth) include elms, limes (lindens), cherries, birches, poplars, willows, sweetgums [pictured above], alders, apples, and conifers such as larches, junipers, western red cedar, the coastal redwood and ginkgo….Growth continues for longer in determinate species but still normally stops well before the end of the growing season, giving time for next year’s early leaves to be preformed in the new buds.

While we are considering buds and stems, let’s admire some flowers.

Chinese pistache

Norway maple

Buckeye/ horse chestnut

The weather could not have been better on May 10 - sunny but not hot and blue skies. The Grassroots Greening walk and the Hidden Gems bike tours were well attended and enjoyed by all. I won’t recount the entirety of the tours here - join us next year for the full experience.

Atop the bridge over the Cordonices Creek along the Ohlone Greenway sit two quail sculptures. Cordonices is Spanish for quail (read more about Spanish derived place names in Berkeley). Note the step design of the bridge. The height from the trail to the top of the railing is appropriate for cycle safety while pedestrians can step up to the railing to view the creek below.

Dave Drummond of California Habitats Indigenous Activists met the walkers to discuss Ohlone culture and plant management. The grass to Dave’s right is purple needle grass, California’s state grass. The plants that comprise the coastal prairie restoration project are local to within three to four miles of the site (Ohlone Greenway adjacent to the Peralta Community Garden).

These folks are walking through a fence that has only been open for a year thanks to the efforts of the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association (a co-sponsor of the walk and bike tours). The small opening is significant, however; one can now (almost) walk from creek to creek. There is a continuous trail from University Avenue (just north of Strawberry Creek Park) to Baxter Creek at the El Cerrito-Richmond border. Also, Schoolhouse Creek runs beneath the feet of the walkers on the other side of the fence.

Both walkers and cyclists were able to visually appreciate the fruits - figuratively and literally - of labor of the Schoolhouse Creek Common group. In addition to the fruit pictured above, one can learn about the differences between the coast live and cork oaks, pictured below.

Bark: cork oak (left), coast live oak

Leaves: cork oak (left), coast live oak

The photos in the remainder of this post were taken on the planning ride for the official tour.

Before lunch at Strawberry Creek Park, the cyclists stopped at Bataan Avenue, a one-block street that runs east west between 7th and 8th Streets. Construction of the approximately 848 square-foot houses began in 1942. Only twelve of the initially proposed 24 houses were built. The project was known as the “Bay Shore Gardens.” The street was named for a World War Two battle. I ably assisted in my research by Jeff, a librarian in the History Room at the Central Library.

Several of the buildings along Bancroft, west of 6th Street, like the one pictured below, feature fine examples of Maybeck’s brick glass.

At Channing and 7th Street is another fine building and reminder of West Berkeley’s industrial landscape: the former home of Edward Niehaus, owner of a planing mill in the neighborhood. Niehaus’s craftmanship is displayed on the exterior of the house; note the various woodworking styles. My favorite is the sunflower relief, pictured below.

Click here to learn about West Berkeley’s industrial history.

You can purchase the Hidden Gems of Berkeley map from me (leave a comment to this post) or John S. (call 849 19 69). The Berkeley Path Wanderers Association pathways map can be purchased here.

Participate in the 6th Annual Hidden Gems Tour of Berkeley this Saturday, May 10, beginning at 10 a.m.!

If you bike, meet at San Pablo Park (Mabel and Russell).
If you walk, meet at the Cordonices Creek bridge at the Ohlone Greenway.
Both the walk and ride will rendezvous at Strawberry Creek park for lunch. After lunch the ride will continue to Westbrae.
For more details, click here for the full-size poster or click here for the event website.

This year we’ll explore the many eclectic hidden gems of West Berkeley and the Westbrae. John Steere, John Coveney, Georgia Silvera Seamans, Susan Schwartz, Jen English (of Walking Berkeley), and guest historians/guides will conduct this 4 mile ride through curiously historic and creative features of the flatlands. Discover exciting citizen-led projects near the old Santa Fe rail route. Community members will introduce you to a new volunteer-built park, a playground transformed by young artists, native plantings, gardens, public art, plans for a exciting new plaza, and more. Bring a lunch, water, and your curiosity!

This tour is sponsored by Berkeley Partners for Parks and is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association,
Bicycle Friendly Berkeley Coalition (as a part of Berkeley Bike Month),
Livable Berkeley, and by
Whole Foods Market - Berkeley.

I’ve written about Philadelphia’s tree-named streets for this blog and have seen tree-named streets in Berkeley, but it was a recent Times article that sparked this post. The Times reporter, in walking Flushing, NY, found several streets named for trees: Ash, Beech, Cherry, and Holly. He writes,

The streets’ names, like the stately trees that shade them, are reminders of a horticultural tradition thought to go back to French Huguenots who came to Flushing around the same time as the Quakers, also seeking religious freedom. Lewis and Clark sent plant specimens to the commercial nursery founded here by Robert Prince in 1737.

I did not learn of a similar horticultural tradition in Berkeley, but the Quick Index to the Origin of Berkeley’s Names published by the Berkeley Historical Society provided some information about streets like Pine Avenue in the Elmwood. It was named for the pine tree. As was

Acacia,
Bay Tree Lane,
Cherry Street,
Cypress Street,
Elmwood Ave and Court,
Eucalyptus Path and Road,
Hawthorne Steps and Terrace,
Laurel Street,
Linden Avenue,
Magnolia Street,
Oak Path, Street, and Street Path,
Oak Knoll Path and Terrace,
Palm Court,
Poplar Path and Street,
Redwood Terrace,
Thousand Oaks Blvd,
Walnut Street,
Willow Trail, Walk, and Path, and
Spruce Street.

Pine Avenue is surrounded by other tree-named streets.

Cedar Street was a case of mistaken identity; a cypress was mistaken for a cedar. Encina Place is named after the Spanish word for live oak; Roble Road was named after the Spanish word for oak. Ensenada Avenue, it follows, was named for the “place of many oaks.” Nogales Street, another Spanish derivative, was named because it was the “place where walnuts grow.” Live Oak Park was named for the “multitude of oak trees there.” Oak Knoll Terrace was named for a “particular oak tree” and Pepper Tree Lane was named for the pepper trees that used to line the road.

Fresno is the Spanish word for ash tree, so Fresno Avenue is named for the ash. The Latin term for the genus to which ash species belong is Fraxinus. Although maligned for is shallow root system that lifts sidewalk panels, Arthur Plotnick (in The Urban Tree Book) notes that the ash tree is sacred in Norse mythology - “honey rained and beer flowed” from the ash, also known as the “Tree of Life.”

I’ve found pigeons to watch; three blocks away, pigeons hang out on the overhead wires across from a 7-Eleven store. I received my Urban Bird Studies/ Project Pigeon Watch a few months ago and have been looking for a spot to observe pigeons for ten-minute stretches. I can submit my data online as well as share essays and photos. The project is sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Four of seven color morphs from the Project PigeonWatch poster are show below (red, spread, white, and checker - counterclockwise from top left).

In response to my post about International Bird Day, Mary Guthrie of the Cornell Lab commented

thanks for your support of the Cornell Lab. I thought you might like the url for IMBD - http://www.birdday.org/history.php. From their home page “Now, IMBD is celebrated almost year-round. Most U.S. and Canada events take place in April and May, while fall events are the norm in the Caribbean and Latin America.” Come visit us in Ithaca!

Susan Bonfield of the International Migratory Bird Day NGO wrote

I ran across your blog and wanted to let you know that International Migratory Bird Day is alive and well, and I’m sorry you had trouble finding information about it. Please visit our website (www.birdday.org) for lots of information, downloadable materials, and ideas. Officially, IMBD is celebrated on the second Saturday in May each year; May 10 in 2008. Because birds’ schedules don’t coincide in all locations, we encourage groups to host in event at the best time.

The London planetree pictured below was recently topped, within the last two weeks. Topping is a poor pruning practice leading to structural and physiological problems. This does not look like pollarding and there are no overhead wires with which a full crown would have interfered.

It is a large diameter planetree, apparently healthy; with a full crown, it would provide many psychosocial and ecosystem benefits. For a live look, the tree is located off Marin on Euclid.

Source: New York Times, Photo by Tom Hanson, The Canadian Press

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, President George Bush, and Mexican President Felipe Calderon

None of the men planted the oak on Lafayette Square; it was a ceremonial planting described by a reporter from The Times-Picayune as “hoist[ing] golden shovels to pitch dirt over a newly planted oak tree in recognition of Earth Day.”

None of the media outlets reported who planted the tree (the Parks Department? an urban forestry NGO?) or the species of oak.

Bicycle parking provided by Bicycle Friendly Berkeley Coalition. At a recent TALC Summit, East Bay Bicycle Coalition provided free valet parking.

Zip Car was at the fair too with a Toyota Prius.

The most recent Daily Planet article on moth spraying can be read here.

Read about the Happy Forever Community Garden here.

Farm Fresh to You produce delivery service. I would miss walking to the farmers’ market.

Human powered climbing opportunity provided by Clif Bar, formerly of Berkeley, with SunPower in the background.

Lawn sitters watch dance group.

I did not find a tree group at the fair (I don’t think Berkeley has an NGO for sidewalk trees), but Spiral Gardens Nursery was selling apple and pear tree at the farmers’ market on Center Street.

Source: Ken Thomas, photographer

Yesterday I told another person outside my household about the cedar waxwing that died after hitting one of the living room windows. Now I share the death with you. It was aweful: I heard a thud, I saw a small feather stuck on the window, and by the time I made it outside, the waxwing was literally taking its last breath.

Cedar waxwings are no longer visiting the yard, at least not in the quantity they did in February when there were many, many berries on the tree I thought was a mountain ash, forgetting that ashes have compound leaves! The red-berried tree in my yard has simple leaves. Dr. Mike Wilcox (in Trees of the World), writing about the mountain ash, notes that its also known as rowan. He describes the tree as follows:

Something about its strongly ascending branches, its lacy foliage or the masses of its striking red berries has connected it with witchcraft from ancient times. It’s very name, rowan, is believed to be derived from the Norse word runa, meaning ‘charm.’ Rowan trees were often planted outside houses and in churchyards to ward of witches (39).

A diversity of birds visit the yard like Cedar Waxwing, Robin, Anna’s Hummingbird, and House Finch. I’ve heard a woodpecker recently; it could be Nuttall’s Woodpecker or Downy Woodpecker. I like to think that the yard offers a variety of niches. There’s a hedgerow of sorts, though Julie Zickefoose would call it a hedge (it’s a monoculture except for some pioneering blackberry). It’s located along the western fence in the neighbor’s yard. A proper hedgerow “is a tangled, assorted mixture of various plants, small trees, and vines” (Zickefoose, 116). Dr. Mike Wilcox uses the word hedgerow and hedge interchangeably in his description of Welsh hedgerows. He writes that “in different periods of history people have favoured different hedgerow plants. An ancient hedgerow will often have giant coppiced trees; hedges of the Tudor age are identified by their maple and dogwood; pre-Tudor hedges feature hazel and spindle; and in post-1800 hedge hawthorn is common” (46).

There are other niches in the yard. The honeysuckle has formed a thicket along the neighbor’s porch. It’s a vine so it’s also crawling along a utility wire that is strung across the front part of the parcel. I had a brush pile, but it was “cleaned up” by gardeners hired by the landlord. The half dead sidewalk tree, a purpleleaf plum, acts as a snag.

Coincidentally I was trying to grow a meadow, another niche recommended by Zickefoose, but the California poppies did not take and I am crossing my fingers for the sunflowers. I got the seeds of the latter from the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL) at the Ecology Center. The yard is also lacking coniferous evergreens. The red-berried tree is evergreen, but Zickefoose highlights the “seeds and shelter” offered by pines, spruces, firs, and cedars.

Although the poppies were a failure and the sunflowers have yet to germinate, there are lots of flowers in the yard. The rose, the quince flower, the lemon flower (the tree is in yard of the neighbor to the east), and the “orange” flower, pictured above (note: this is not the actual name of the plant).

Open. Ramblas. Terraced. These are the forms of hybridity developed by Hood Design for the Center Street project. Details of the design are on display in the northern and northwest windows of Cody’s Books. (The photographs were taken at mid-day.)

Will Berkeley residents choose open hybrid, ramblas hybrid, or terraced hybrid? What’s your choice?

Note the creek element in the second section.

“It’s a ‘duck,’” said John of the spigot outside Hydra on Fourth Street. The architectural term “duck,” coined by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, was new to me. The first duck was a duck; a duck-shaped building in Long Island built by a duck farmer.

A duck is “any building shaped like its product,” according to a Newsday article reporting on the Long Island Big Duck. Technically, the Hydra building is not a duck. It is not shaped like a spigot or other bath product though the spigot alerts you to the fact that the store sells bath-related items. Interestingly, you can see a large yellow duckie through one of the windows (third window from the right).

The Hydra spigot “duck” is one of the sites on this year’s Hidden Gems Tour. The tour will begin at San Pablo Park on Saturday, May 10 at 10 a.m.

Well, I thought today was International Bird Day. I found the holiday on the About.com Homeschooling website via a web search of bird holidays. I have not found reference to this holiday on any bird science or advocacy sites like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. What I did find on the USFWS website is reference to International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD) which is celebrated in May, though I could not find a specific date. The Smithsonian National Zoological Park will celebrate IMBD from April 24 to May 1 while the Region 9 Forest Service will celebrate on May 17.

Regardless of the existence of International Bird Day, today is as good as any other day to celebrate birds, in particular urban birds. Local ecology is a participant in the Urban Bird Studies program at Cornell. The five bird projects are PigeonWatch, Gulls Galore, Dove Detectives, Birds in the City, and Crows Count. Celebrate Urban Birds! focuses on sixteen, easily identifiable bird species. I receive print and digital materials from the Lab of Ornithology including most recently a letter about the 25th annual World Series of Birding (WSB), a “carefully timed plan to find the most birds in 24 hours” to be held in New Jersey! You can pledge cents or dollar amounts per species to be observed at the WSB website.

I also received a well designed poster of pigeon color morphs - red, checker, pied, spread, white, red- and blue-bar. The Project PigeonWatch website has a “question of the month” feature. This month’s question is: Why don’t I ever see baby pigeons? You can view the video response here. Unlike the rock pigeon, the red-tailed hawk is not one of the program’s 16 species. However, a hawk at Fenway Park in Boston made headlines after scratching a teenager visiting the stadium last week [via Birding Girl].

At the Fulton and Ward intersection in Berkeley, I heard a woodpecker pecking a hole in a nearby tree. I no longer see cedar waxwings at the mountain ash in my yard; they have eaten all the berries and moved on. Today, happily, I browsed the nature shelves at Cody’s on Shattuck and found the following bird titles (visit our book shop):

Parrot by Paul Carter

Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird, Andrew D. Blechman

Condor: To the Brink and Back–the Life and Times of One Giant Bird, John Nielsen

Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World, Candace Savage

April 11 — 13
Changing Climates: Class, Culture & Politics in an Era of Global Warming
California Studies Conference schedule [via Urban Alliance]

April 12, Saturday, 10 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Daily Acts Sustainability Tour in San Francisco
Daily Acts Tours website [via Urban Alliance]

April 13, Sunday, 1 - 5 p.m.
Art in the Garden
The Institute of Urban Homesteading website

April 23, Wednesday, 1 -2 p.m.
Three Centuries of Boston’s Great Public Spaces and Private Garden Squares
UC Berkeley, 315A Wurster Hall (information)

April 22 — 26
7th International Ecocity Conference
Nob Hill Masonic Center, San Francisco (information)

Through June
A Passion for Plants: Botanical Paintings by Catherine M. Watters and her students
SF Botanical Garden website

Through September 21
Wildflowers of New England: Photographs by Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848–1938)
de Young Museum website

Through October 12
In Our Own Backyard: A Celebration of the East Bay Regional Parks
Oakland Museum of California website

Through November
Tree Walks, Canopy calendar

Transplant micro greens. Check.
Plant organic Cherokee Purple tomato. Check.
Plant Golden Bell sweet pepper. Check.

Three small garden tasks but huge satisfaction from being outside with the sun at my back. Now I am back indoors to blog about recent headlines. In this weekend’s New York Times you can read about a 7,000 square foot North Stamford, Conn. house applying for LEED certification. The house is one of 24 houses on “74 partly wooded acres with a private lake.” Also in the Business section is a story about the Audubon Society’s new and smaller headquarters in Manhattan; the organization’s president is reported to have said that Audubon “went well beyond the criteria needed to be awarded the highest, or platinum, LEED certification.”

The Times also reported on “a shift in the debate over global warming.” Economists and scientists are emphasizing the role of more efficient technology over emissions caps in cutting emissions long term. One of the more efficient technologies cited is “lighter vehicles with more efficient engines.” I was surprised to read this because I heard at Saturday’s TALC Summit that “the more we drive [even if the car is a Prius] outweighs the benefits of technology.” The ClimatePlan California presenters emphasized changing travel behaviors over advances in transportation technology. For example, people who live within a 1/2 mile radius of where they live or work are 10 times more likely to use transit than people who do not. People who live in walkable, mixed use neighborhoods take 30% fewer driving trips than those who do not. The ClimatePlan brochure can be downloaded here.

Of course, neighborhoods also have to be attractive, or possess quality pedestrian environments. A group of physicians and public health professionals from the SF Public Health Department at the TALC Summit presented, among other indexes, the Pedestrian Environmental Quality Index. Many of the elements that encourage pedestrian activity fall under the purview of the landscape architect. Coincidentally, April is National Landscape Architecture Month. Two Orion magazine essays unintentionally honor the field of landscape architecture: “A swamp forest grows in Brooklyn and “Managing the trees of Arlington Cemetery.

Plants are a major element in landscape architectural practice. Issue 010 of Good magazine has run several short features on the uses of vegetation. The Science Barge is a project of New York Sun Works, an organization that “provides technical services in support of rooftop greenhouses and building-integrated agriculture in both educational and commercial settings worldwide.” The Barge, floating on the Hudson River, is an urban farm operated with rain and river water as well as sunlight and wind power.

At a smaller scale, Mathieu Lehanneaur and David Edwards (Harvard scientist) have created the Bel-Air filter, powered by plants. The filter works as follows: “the air circulates among the leaves, and then the filter forces it out through the plant’s roots” (Good, page 26). Click here to see the Bel-Air. No species is specified for the filter, but it would probably be a common indoor plant. Indoor and outdoor plants that “mollify” toxics and purify the air, according to Good, include peace lily (benzene in detergents and trichloroethylene in paints); English ivy (trichloroethylene in tobacco smoke); Poinsettia (formaldehyde in water repellent); Gerbera daisy (trichloroethylene in dry cleaning and inks); Azalea (formaldehyde in foam insulation); and Chrysanthemum (benzene in plastics, trichloroethylene in inks, and formaldehyde in household cleaners).

Now back to the start of this post - food plants. The Food Trust in Philadelphia advocates for community health via access to healthy food. For example, the organization assisted a small corner store in a Philadelphia neighborhood to dramatically increase its fresh food selection [via Good]. More locally, Public Health Law & Policy in Oakland has published the “How to make healthy changes in your neighborhood” guide. The brochure first poses three questions. One, do you live near a community garden? Two, does your neighborhood grocery store sell good-quality, low-cost fruits and vegetables? And three, is there a farmers’ market in your neighborhood? If a reader answers “no” to just one of the questions, the brochure offers the reader eight steps “to get more fruits and vegetables” into her neighborhood (also in Spanish). My answer to all three questions is yes, but the community garden closest to me is a school garden and thus inaccessible. However, I manage to grow a few things in my 1′ x 10′ home garden. My neighborhood grocery store is Berkeley Bowl which is known for its affordable, varied, and good quality produce. The closest farmers’ market, four blocks away, is the Tuesday market at Derby and Milvia.

Easter Sunday found us in Sacramento for the “Treasures from Hearst Castle” exhibit at the California Museum of History, Women and the Arts. I heard of the exhibit on the March 12 broadcast of Forum with Michael Krasny. I especially wanted to see the five-foot replica of the castle’s tiled bath tub. Amanda Meeker, director of exhibitions at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts, listed this item as one of her favorites in the exhibit. I was disappointed; there was no tub. The replica was simply a swatch of colored tiles embedded in the floor of the exhibit area. Regardless, the artifacts from the castle are incredibly beautiful and diverse in design and origin.

On the way to the museum, we walked through Capitol Park, the 40-acre grounds of the Sacramento Capitol. I noticed markers on the trees labeled with the words “Tree Tour” followed by a number. For example, the Canary Island date palm pictured above (right) is tree #61 on the tour. The Capitol was closed - it was a Sunday and a holiday - so I could not get a copy of the tree tour map. At least I assumed there was a tree tour map. An online search later in the day did not yield a map or mention of a map, but the Sacramento Tree Foundation offers guided tours of the park. There is a weathered, laminated map attached to a concrete block near the Ninth Street entrance. Of the trees identified on the map I was most interested in finding the monkey puzzle tree. I did not find the tree; I became disoriented without a portable map and the intense sunshine was exhausting.

On the streets around the Capitol, I found oak galls (pictured above), ginkgo flowers (below), and sycamores (also below).

I know the tree pictured above is not a London planetree (P. x acerifolia) based on Arthur Plotnik’s description below. (Note that the species name - acerifolia - is composed of the genus name for maple - Acer - and the Latin word for foliage or leaf - folia. The shape of the planetree leaf is similar to that of the maple.) It could be an American sycamore/ western planetree (P. occidentalis) based on Plotnik’s description below, but this specis is not listed on the Sacramento Tree Foundation’s tree list. The tree list contains the California sycamore (Platanus racemosa). Sacramento Tree Foundation is a well-respected urban forestry organization, so I will assume that the tree in the photograph is a California sycamore and that Plotnik’s description is making a distinction between the hybrid London planetree and non-hybrid native sycamores.

Plotnik, in The Urban Tree Book, describes the bark characteristics of sycamores as follows:

The London planetree and its parts are a feast for observers. The tan-gray outer bark, which cannot stretch to keep up with the tree’s growth, peels away (exfoliates) in tubular curls and reveals patches of the smooth inner bark. The colors of this bark vary according to exposure to sunlight and species variety, but the London planetree will usually show a pretty olive green and sometimes a pale yellow among its mottle, even on the trunk. (American sycamores retain more of the flaky outer bark on the trunk {my emphasis}; branches are smoother and show grays, tans, and whites.)

Except this one is not paved. The mid-block lot on the north side of Blake between Fulton and Shattuck has been vacant for the past four years, at least. I had plans for this lot: the 4B Habitat Project. The B’s are bats, bees, birds, and butterflies. Now - within the last month - it is a parking lot. Although it is unpaved, at least one half of the lot is compacted by through traffic. Note the parallel ruts in the second photograph.

December 2007

March 28, 2008

Cody’s San Francisco outlet closed in 2007, ironically in April, the same month it will open its newest store in its home city of Berkeley, though not in its original location. The old storefront on Telegraph remains empty.

The posters on the windows predicted an April opening for the Shattuck at Allston store - and the website lists the official grand opening as April 1 - but Cody’s Books opened its doors today for Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life. The bookstore relocated its Fourth Street inventory to Shattuck - a difference of more than 3,000 square feet - because of rising rents.

It’s good to see another empty (corner) storefront on Shattuck filled. Cody’s does not have to compete with Barnes & Noble which closed last fall, but there are two prominent bookstores in the area: Half Price Books on Shattuck at Addison and Pegasus Books on Shattuck at Durant (across from the old Barnes & Noble, now Staples, almost). In an interview with the Chronicle, Pegasus owner, Amy Thomas, wished Cody’s “a happy landing.”

I am happily a weekly subscriber to the New York Times. In high school, the Science Times was my favorite section of the Times and after reading it this morning, it still is. In lieu of this weekend’s headlines, I’m blogging articles in today’s Science Times.

Efforts of dancing bees are often wasted on distracted audience

Link to global warming in frogs’ disappearance is challenged
* Frogs - the species in question are really toads - are amphibians.

Bats perish, and no one knows why

Are we ready to track carbon footprints?

Tying neighborhoods to fitness efforts

And from the Berkeley Daily Planet, an article about the creek and museum plans for Oxford and Center Streets. Read responses to the article here and here.

Creek section below the “hazard” sign

Lately I’ve been hanging around Strawberry Creek Park - working with Affordable Housing Associates and scoping out a route and sponsors for the Berkeley Partners for Parks Spring event “Walk Bike Westbrae/ West Berkeley” sponsored with the Hidden Gems Tour and Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. You will recall that I’ve been on the Hidden Gems Tour. The Walk Bike event is planned for Saturday, May 10 with the walk portion starting at the Albany border and the bike portion starting at San Pablo Park, both at 10 a.m.

Looking north and south

So, I’ve been walking around and through the park and observing berms, swales, and desire paths. The berms and mid-park depression form a bowl for water retention. The berms on the northern side also provide privacy from Addison Street. The berms on the northeast and the south are heavily planted with trees providing two mini-woodlands/ groves. There is a bench beneath the northeast berm which provides prospect over the park, pictured below.

A swale runs along the eastern edge of the park (below). Although I did not see a storm drain at its end, I assume the swale captures, slows, and possibly cleans stormwater runoff before it reaches the creek for which the park is named.

The park features an element that was not designed: desire paths, pictured below. I noticed two, both on the southern edge of park, coming off the asphalt park below the southern berms and north of the creek bank.

See the Friends of Strawberry Creek website for information about creek segments.

Two BART trains and three buses. This was the route generated by 511.org to get me from Ashby to the Cow Palace, site of this year’s San Francisco Flower & Garden Show. Luck was with me. I took a direct BART to the city, met a friend for a long lunch, then took another direct BART to Balboa Park. At the Balboa station there was a shuttle waiting to transport visitors to the show!

I bought my half-day ticket in advance rather than at the door so I would definitely attend the show. I wanted to see the urban forest garden - “Healthy Communities Grow on Trees” - developed by the USDA Forest Service, California Urban Forests Council, and the Mandeville Garden Company, but I would not have a companion so feared that I would back out at the last minute. In addition to the urban forest garden, I also wanted to see the garden that was the subject of a San Francisco Chronicle series on the show: “Ripples and Rays” by East Bay designers Joy Lung and Christian Ehrhorn of Misty Morning Gardens. (Joy Lung is the sister of a friend).

I saw both gardens and discovered a third: “It Doesn’t Take a Hectare” by Sommersett Designs and Leiber Landscape Services, both of Walnut Creek, pictured above. (Note the hare sculpture by Phillip Glashoff and the play with the word “hectare.") The designers used the same plant palette in four different designs (pictured below). Plants included herbs, lettuces, Meyer lemons, and vegetables like radishes and celery. The marketing material, written by Shelley Somersett, APLD, of Somersett Designs, describes the concept as follows:

It doesn’t take a hectare to feed a family four square
Heirlooms in the Cottage or on an Urban Roof
Wine Country Tuscan or Berkeley “Locavore’
No GMOs are in our food, the nutrients are proof.

Take some dirt, add sunshine, clean water and fresh air,
A designer for the garden and you’re half way there.
When Edibles are planted, sustainable’s the fare.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner your neighbor too can share
The earth still laughs in flowers, the chef’s gourment affair
Feed a hungry neighbor, teach the world to share.

The primary draw for me was the urban forest garden. I have worked as both a community and an urban forester. (There is debate about the definition and scope of the term “urban forest” and thus urban forester; it is more accurate to say I was a street tree manager.) I am very interested in the ecosystem values of designed landscapes and wanted to see the interpretation offered by a major forestry agency like the U.S. Forest Service.

While I was familiar with information provided in the urban forest garden, it was the most uniquely themed garden at the show. The garden was aesthetically pleasing; this is very important to counter lingering misperceptions that ecosystem gardens or landscapes are unattractive. Also, the exhibition was well designed and educative. Numbered signs within the garden highlighted “sound urban forestry concepts.” For example, sign #7 encourages the removal of lawns and replacement with “grass-like species” like dwarf sedge, pictured below. The bench in the photograph was designed by West Coast Arborists using street trees.

Other urban forestry best practices include native plant choices to provide food and habitat for insects, birds, and other animals (sign #4 pictured above, right) and planting larger stature trees to generate environmental benefits like carbon and particulate matter sequestration and storm-water attenuation.

A large stature trees like a coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) saves 6,010 kilo Watt hours and intercepts 6300 lbs of carbon and 26,900 gallons of stormwater over its lifetime. This compares to 3,270 kWh, 5400 lbs of carbon, 18 lbs of air pollutants, and 14,800 gallons of stormwater for a medium, ornamental tree like an evergreen pear (Pyrus kawakamii). Source: exhibit marketing material.

At the exit I was handed a flyer alerting me to California State Senate Bill SB1527 which proposes to sell the Cow Palace and convert the land to condos and a strip mall. For more information and a petition visit the Save our Cow Palace website.

Leaving behind the trucker hat: young urbanites, learning that dirt can also be soil, are using their overalls as originally intended New York Times

Mark Armstrong’s alternative fuel philosophy SF Chronicle Magazine

San Leandro firm among few mattress recyclers Chronicle

The growth of green [jobs] Chronicle

Habitat for harmony: how to garden the way nature intended Slate Magazine

Listening to Ira Flatow on today’s Science Friday, I learned, among other things, that National Pi Day is celebrated on March 14. Pi, as is in “the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter” and March 14 as in 3.14 (see the official National Pi Day and the Science Friday websites). March 14 is also Einstein’s birthday!

This plaza in downtown Oakland (below) would almost be a PIazza if it did not have the landscaped square. (Technically, a piazza is an open, i.e. “without grass or planting” square.) Notice the keep out sign for preservation.

Back to pi(e)s: if you don’t have one already, you should consider a backyard orchard. You could be celebrating Pi Day with a grown-in-your own-backyard fruit pie. If fruit is not your thing or you prefer pizza, why not order a pie from Pie in the Sky pizzeria on Center Street in Berkeley? However, backyard orchards are the latest “local-food movement” phenomenon, according to the New York Times, so plant a fruit tree or two, so can celebrate Pi Day 2011 or 2013 with your very own fruit pie.

Proposed improvements on Lakeshore Avenue

A brief excerpt from the poster above outlining the City’s position on tree removal around Lake Merritt (and other city parks):

There seems to be a philosophical difference between the approach of the City and that of some citizens regarding trees in urban parks. Some citizens feel that all trees should be left in place until they die, no matter what. The City takes the approach that trees in an urban park should be managed as one would take care of a garden at home.

Homey new uses for old utilities New York Times

Shifting demographics hint at SoMa’s future San Francisco Chronicle

Pesticide maker owned by political donor Chronicle

Mildred Kalish’s little house on the farm Chronicle

Tree-sitter’s battle branches out at Cal Chronicle

Oakland joins fight to halt State moth spray plan Berkeley Daily Planet

Greenhouse gas session generates political heat Daily Planet

Surviving oaks still shade Alden Lane Nursery Daily Planet

Several weeks ago I saw a link to the City of Berkeley’s zoning applications map on the Daily Planet web site. I can no longer find this link but the South Berkeley applications are available here (and pictured below) and the North Berkeley applications are available here.

I visited several application sites in my South Berkeley neighborhood which are pictured below.

The houses at 2205 and 2201 Blake Street are beautiful examples of Victorian and Queen Anne architecture, which according to the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, were landmarked in September 2005. The online zoning application map must be outdated. The web site states that the Blake Street houses are initiating the landmark process. No dates are included on the web site.

The application for a takeout deli and coffee shop located at 2120 Dwight Way is a former printing shop. When I first saw the Dwight Way address I assumed it was the former deli - Roxie - at Dwight and Fulton which has been under reconstruction/ change of ownership for many months now. I am excited that there might be a coffee shop in this part of the neighborhood! I would be even more excited it a tea shop would open; the closest one is Far Leaves on College Avenue or Imperial Tea in North Berkeley.

Will the wireless telecommunications facility be built at 27121 Shattuck, site of UC Storage? I remember seeing numerous flyers affixed to utility poles contesting the facility.

Immediately north of UC Storage, a vacant lot (an old car show lot?) is the future site of a five story, 24 unit, mixed-use building. Great! This lot is unused, unattractive, and paved, so pioneering “wild greenery” have a difficult time establishing themselves. Herbaceous flowering plants, grasses, and shrubs and trees - and worms and soil microorganisms - would support bees, butterflies, and birds.

Another site of note is Modernaire, the new, expensive, modern-shelter ware store, at Dwight and Shattuck. It iss unrelated to the zoning applications theme of this post, but I wonder if it’s a foreshadowing of future development along south Shattuck. I was told that the car dealerships on south Shattuck - Honda, Volvo, and Nissan - might be moving to a new “auto row” near the border of Berkeley and Emeryville. The relocation would open up several large parcels along this stretch of Shattuck.

This post began its life as a short essay about “what’s in a name.” I’ve long been interested in the use of natural elements to name places. Of course, it is ironic in a suburban context where streets and subdivisions are named for plants and animals that no longer inhabit the area, at least not in the numbers they did before development. Anyway, I’ve also been enamored of the large coast live oak at Oakland City Hall and thought the combination of place naming and oak trees would make a good post.

In 1852 the City of Oakland was officially incorporated from Rancho Encinal de San Antonio owned by Anthony Peralta. The translation is ranch of the oak grove of St. Anthony. The men present at incorporation considered An Antonio, Encinal Oak Grove, and Land of the Oaks, before settling on Oakland (Land of the Oaks, James Harlow, 1956).

Pre-incorporation, the Rancho Encinal de San Antonio hosted 900 acres of oak woodland in present day downtown Oakland (dissertation, David J. Nowak, 1991). The woodland had “approximately 1400 trees with fourteen percent tree cover within the stand” (Nowak, 105). According to Nowak, the oak woodland was the second most dominant vegetation type preceded by grass/ shrub/ marshland which covered 98% of the area. The third and fourth most dominant vegetation types were riparian woodlands at 350 acres with 110,000 trees and redwood stands at 175 acres with 13,000 trees. Total tree cover in Rancho Encinal de San Antonio is estimated at 2.3%.

Harlow (1956, 16) notes that Oakland’s “first name might have been Temescal.” The Peralta brothers named the creek that flows through the former ranch Temescal, possibly after sweat lodges (or temescalli) sited along the creek (see Wikipedia entry on the Oakland neighborhood).

Another Bay Area creek is named for something that used to be common along its bank. Strawberry Creek in Berkeley was so named for the strawberries that grew along its bank (Harlow). I wonder if daylighting plans for the creek include replanting strawberries. The option to pick your own fruit at a public creek-park would be another first for Berkeley.

Finally, back in Oakland, the Fruitvale district was named for orchards and fruit farms that were the dominant land use during the nineteenth century.

Development transforms San Pablo eyesore San Francisco Chronicle

Pittsburg pipe dream Chronicle

Snowpack not satisfying state water officials Chronicle

Helping urban trees to thrive Chronicle
Read other articles from the Green special edition: Threats – And Saviors – For The Trees.

[Berkeley] Council may face State in court to stop moth spray Berkeley Daily Planet

When houses arrived in 30,000 pieces New York Times

The way we eat: Sap happy [or maple syrup making by painter Marc Seguin and friends] Times Magazine

Preserving a forest and a philosophy [or how to “stay true” to the production of natural products] Times

I have been reading Michael Shnayerson’s Coal River with shock, sadness, anger, and hope. I borrowed the book after reading a review in the New York Times Book Review. Tonight I found out that coal extracted via mountaintop removal powers my home.* My electricity supplier is Pacific Gas and Electric. According to iLoveMountains.org, PG&E “buys coal from companies engaged in mountaintop removal,” a practice that has devastating consequences not only for the physical environment, but also for social communities and physiological well-being. I encourage you to read Shnayerson’s book. One strategy to end mountaintop removal coal mining, the Clean Water Protection Act H.R. 2169, is being supported by Representative Barbara Lee. Click on the image below to find out your connection to mountaintop removal coal mining and for resources on how you can help to preserve Appalachian landscapes and communities.

* via Bootstrap Analysis.

On my walk home along Shattuck, the air smelled like lilacs, like the east coast lilacs in my community garden plot. Here are some other blossoms from my Leap Day walk.

The local ecologist is no longer updated via Blogger. Also, we could not migrate our skin, so we are working on recreating the old one.

On the afternoon NPR news hour I heard that Berkeley along with Oakland and San Francisco are in the top ten greenest cities in the U.S. The number one city is Portland with a 4.8 score for “green living” while Berkeley is number seven with a 2.8 score for “green living.” Recently a friend and I wre struck by the lack of stormwater management in Berkeley. This was foremost on my mind watching the recent downpours run off into the storm drains. Maybe Berkeley can improve its score by installing green streets (see Portland, Oregon) and permeable sidewalks (see San Francisco). Here are other headlines from the weekend.

UC removes ropes at Oak Grove protest, erects extra barricade Daily Planet

Critics organize against Apple Moth spraying in East Bay Daily Planet

Cody’s to move Downtown, leave 4th Street Daily Planet

Pelican to trail walkers: Move it or lose it Chronicle

Dot-com sends scavengers after tomatoes, cash Chronicle

Matt Stoecker’s plan is to set the steelhead free to get back to Corte Madera Creek Chronicle

Governors want federal transportation funds Chronicle

Bay Area performing arts groups going green Chronicle
The marquis announces that the theatre is the first 100% solar powered theatre in the U.S.

Zero-carbon city plan draws cautious praise Chronicle

Amid weeds and rust, a ruin seeks a second act New York Times

The battle over the greens Times

local ecologist is no longer maintained via Blogger. It is now fully integrated with local ecology.