The study and science of plants.

Upscale Wilderness

April 1, 2010 •  by

Napa’s Palisades are rugged, beautiful, and about as wild as it gets in the Bay Area. And with the wildflowers in bloom, spring is high season for a great hike above the vineyards.

With Rain Comes Life, and Death

December 2, 2009 •  by

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: A Wetlands Supermarket

October 1, 2009 •  by

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.

Coe’s Fire Followers

October 1, 2009 •  by

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.

urchin galls

Call of the Galls

July 1, 2009 •  by

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.

Hard Time to Be an Oak

July 1, 2009 •  by

About one-eighth of California’s land area is covered in oak woodlands. Despite that vast acreage, it’s hard to be an oak in California. Threats to oak survival include the effects of fire management, increased pressure from booming rodent and deer populations, disease, drought, competition from exotic plants, and the largest threat of all, development…

Dinosaur Plants

April 1, 2009 •  by

While living dinosaurs are nowhere to be found in California these days, you can see recognizable descendants of plants that lived with them–right here in the modern Bay Area.

Sudden Oak Death Blitz

April 1, 2009 •  by

The deadly plant disease known as sudden oak death (SOD) has spread to 14 coastal counties, and according to UC Berkeley’s Forest Pathology and Mycology Lab, the continuing epidemic threatens the survival of tanoaks, an ecologically important native tree, as … Read more