The study and science of plants.
For the The University of California Botanical Garden in the Berkeley Hills is home to one of the nation's largest collections of plant life. It houses many rare and endangered plants hard to find anywhere else, and for the month of July, it also houses comics. Yes, comics.
Jack Laws finds new wonders at a familiar haunt.
Next time you sneeze, think of it as an homage to pollen, the key to the reproduction of plants all over the world. Look a little closer, and this stuff turns out to be well worth a few sneezes now and then!
Native plant advocates charge that the studies done for the proposed casino at Richmond’s Point Molate ignore the site’s rare collection of native grasses.
A construction site along one of San Francisco’s busiest thoroughfares hardly seems like a good spot to find one of our region’s rarest plants. But that’s just where a passing biologist saw a manzanita thought extinct for decades. And now a whole lot of people are trying to make sure this lone survivor isn’t the last Franciscan manzanita.
After three years of drought, the forecast for a wet El Nino winter this year is welcome news indeed. Unless you're an oak or tanoak tree. Researchers fear a wet year could mean an epidemic spread of sudden oak death (SOD). But a new preventive treatment and easy precautions could help contain the disease.
Cattails are hard to miss, yet often dismissed. Whether in solitary clumps in a ditch or spread out in marshy fields, the burnt umber rockets hovering above dark-green blades add texture and familiarity to the landscape. They also turn out to be quite useful, with pollen that can be used as flour and roots that might help wetlands cope with sea level rise.
The 2007 Lick Fire was a firestorm that consumed 47,000 acres, most of it in Henry W. Coe State Park, east of Gilroy. Just days after the fire, park volunteers were on the scene. Two years later the "fire followers" of Coe Park are still at it, and even in the face of park budget cuts, they hope to keep their research going for years to come.
A year after fire burned through San Bruno Mountain, artist Jack Laws visited to see the recovery of Buckeye and Owl canyons.
Standing sentinel near the highest point in the East Bay Regional Park District, an ancient blue oak is our window into a spectrum of life in the orbit of one grand tree.
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
