In the Garden - Foraging for Berries, the Special on Nature’s Produce Aisle - NYTimes.com

• By ANNE RAVER

  Published: July 3, 2008

• I’VE been feasting on wild black raspberries every day as I walk down to the stream with my dog, Wolfie, at our family farm in Maryland. The wild brambles seem to grow best along the sunny edge of the meadow where it meets the trees near the water.

  I follow one of the meandering paths that Rock, my boyfriend, started clearing years ago, so we wouldn’t have to climb through a tangle of thorny canes and poison ivy. Now we can stand right next to the arching canes, picking only the perfectly ripe berries. We leave the green ones to sweeten up.

  There are all kinds of wild fruits ripening at this time of year — not only raspberries, but also mulberries, sweet and sour cherries, blueberries, blackberries, serviceberries, wineberries and elderberries. These delicacies flourish in public parks and arboretums, along quiet country roads, even on shrubs and trees planted in malls and subdivisions.

• Too few people grow up now the way Mr. Allgeier and I did, following grandmothers who knew where to find the best wild elderberries for making jam.

Yale Environment 360: Michael Pollan on What’s Wrong with Environmentalism

• I don’t know exactly what percentage of greenhouse gas we would reduce if everybody planted a garden, but it would be a percentage and it would be a help. If you go back to the victory garden moment in American history during World War II when the government strongly encouraged us all to plant gardens because we were reserving the output of our agricultural system for the troops and for starving Europeans — within a year or two, we actually got up to producing forty percent of our produce from home gardens.
• The writer Wendell Berry was right a long time ago when he said the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. It’s really about how we live. The thought that we can swap out the fuel we’re putting in our cars to ethanol, and swap out the electricity to nuclear and everything else can stay the same, I think, is really a pipe dream. We’re going to have to change, and the beginning of knowing how to change is learning how to provide for yourself a little bit more.
• We were having this conversation in the 1970s
• But it was a simpler time.
• We would give a lot for their crises right now. They look pretty easy to solve compared to what we face.
• In the 80s, Reagan took the solar panels off the roof of the White House. Carter was belittled for his concern. It was a shrinking of the American horizon. The whole idea of limits was discredited by “morning in America” and the promise of unlimited growth once again.
• Pollan: I don’t see myself as a writer of food and the environment. I see myself as a kind of nature writer who likes writing about the messy places where the human world and the natural world intersect. I’m much less interested in wilderness, where most American writers interested in nature writing go to think about nature, than I am in gardens and houses and diets. All these places where we can’t just look at nature and admire it, or deplore what’s happening to it, but we really have to engage, we have to change.
• My writing all starts in the garden. My experience was entering the garden with a head full of Thoreau and Emerson, and finding those ideas, as beautiful as they are, do not prepare you for when the woodchuck comes and mows down your little crop of seedlings.

• We’ve had in this country what I call a wilderness ethic that’s been very good at telling us what to preserve. You know, eight percent of the American landmass we’ve kind of locked up and thrown away the key. That’s a wonderful achievement and has given us things like the wilderness park.

  This is one of our great contributions to world culture, this idea of wilderness. On the other hand, it’s had nothing to say of any value for the ninety-two percent of the landscape that we cannot help but change because this is where we live. This is where we grow our food, this is where we work. Essentially the tendency of the wilderness ethic is to write that all off. Land is either virgin or raped. It’s an all or nothing ethic. It’s either in the realm of pristine, preserved wilderness, or it’s development — parking lot, lawn.

• So I think we’re undergoing a sea change. I think that environmentalists are recognizing that as important as wilderness is as a standard, as a baseline, sustainability is a very different baseline. I think our focus is moving from wilderness to sustainability. That’s not to say we have to destroy the wilderness to have sustainability. It’s just that, okay, we did that. That was the project that engaged us for 150 years. The project now is very much more the gardener’s project, or the farmer’s project, which is how to use nature without ruining it.

The Hidden Gardens of Paris - NYTimes.com

• By ELAINE SCIOLINO

  Published: June 29, 2008

• Multimedia

  Slide Show

  The Quiet Corners of Paris

   

  Map

  Paris, France

• Intimate, lightly trafficked and often quirky, the small gardens of Paris can be ideal places to rest and to read. The trick is to find them. You can consult “Paris: 100 Jardins Insolites” (“Paris: 100 Unusual Gardens”), a guide by Martine Dumond whose color photos make discovery for the non-French speaker a pleasure, or explore various Web sites like www.paris-walking-tours.com/parisgardens.html. Or you can simply wander on foot, confident that around the next corner there will be something new.
• You’ll find spaces for listening to a concert or watching a puppet show (like the Parc de Bagatelle in the 16th Arrondissement); church gardens (like the one enclosing the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Seventh Arrondissement); gardens with vegetable patches (like the Jardin Catherine-Labouré in the Seventh Arrondissement); oriental gardens (like the one at Unesco headquarters in the Seventh Arrondissement that was a gift of the Japanese government). There are gardens with beehives, bird preserves, out-of-fashion roses, chessboards, playgrounds, menageries, panoramic views, even a rain forest and a farm. Green spaces adjoin cemeteries, embassies, movie theaters and hotels.

Climate change threatens two-thirds of California’s unique plants, study says - Los Angeles Times

• The state’s plants are at risk of collapse unless they migrate or are moved to refuges, scientists say. Animals may also be separated from plants on which they depend, according to researchers.

  By Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
  June 25, 2008

• Two-thirds of California’s unique plants, some 2,300 species that grow nowhere else in the world, could be wiped out across much of their current geographic ranges by the end of the century because of rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, according to a new study.

  The species that cannot migrate fast enough to higher altitudes or cooler coastal areas could face extinction because of greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet, according to researchers.

• Half of the plant species that are unique to the continental United States grow only in the Golden State, from towering redwoods to slender fire poppies. And under likely climate scenarios, many would have to shift 100 miles or more from their current range — a difficult task given slow natural migration rates and obstacles presented by suburban sprawl.
• The study, which was based on more than 80,000 specimens, was hailed as groundbreaking by leading scientists in the field. "It is a timely analysis of the likely fate of the plants of California in the face of climate change," Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden and coauthor of seminal texts on California flora, said in an e-mail.

  And in Southern California, given water shortages and habitat disruption, he added, "lots of the populations are right on the edge. . . . The balance could easily be tipped so we could lose many of them in a very short period of time."

  As California’s unique species migrate, they could be separated from the creatures that pollinate them. Animals could be divided from the plants on which they depend, the researchers noted.

• The state may also have to set aside new refuges and corridors, and prepare to move some plants if necessary. "Planning for plant refugees will become a new but important concept for natural reserves to think about," said biologist Brent Mishler, director of the University and Jepson Herbaria at UC Berkeley, the state’s most important flora collection.
• Native plants often support 10 to 50 times as many species of native wildlife as nonnative plants, and biologist Philip Rundel, a California plant specialist at UCLA, noted that the effects measured by the study "will surely be paralleled by what we can expect to occur with animal species."

  "This article is a wake-up call for all Californians that global change impacts on our environment are more than just a theoretical issue."

  margot.roosevelt@

  latimes.com

Keeping it wild: an interagency strategy to monitor trends in wilderness character across the National Wilderness Preservation System

• Keeping it wild: an interagency strategy to monitor trends in wilderness character across the National Wilderness Preservation System

  Author: Landres, Peter; Barns, Chris; Dennis, John G.; Devine, Tim; Geissler, Paul; McCasland, Curtis S.; Merigliano, Linda; Seastrand, Justin; Swain, Ralph

• The Interagency Wilderness Character Monitoring Team–representing the Department of the Interior (DOI) Bureau of Land Management, DOI Fish and Wildlife Service, DOI National Park Service, DOI U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Forest Service-offers in this document an interagency strategy to monitor trends in wilderness character across the National Wilderness Preservation System.

Firewood and Invasive Insects - NYS Dept. of Environmental Conservation

• New York’s forests are under attack from numerous invasive exotic insect pests. In years past, we have been hit with Chestnut blight, European gypsy moth, Dutch elm disease and Beech bark disease, all with devastating results.

• One common way many of these insect pests are moved around the country - beyond their natural rate of spread based on biology and flight potential - is on firewood carried by campers, hunters and other users of our forests.

• 

• A casual observation of boaters and campers checking in at any campground will reveal trunk loads or boatloads of firewood being brought in, often from far distant states.Once transported to new locations, eggs may hatch, or larvae may mature and emerge to attack host trees in and around the camping areas.

• Invasive insects transported on firewood are killing
  trees in our favorite campgrounds

• n the Lake States, the exotic, invasive Emerald ash borer (EAB) has caused great destruction of all native species of ash trees (which are also common across New York).

• 

• New York State is now less than 150 miles from the nearest EAB infestations.

• Vehicle transporting firewood which may contain
  tree-killing insects

• The Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) was first confirmed in New York State in 1996. Areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Nassau and Suffolk Counties are also under Federal quarantine which prohibits the movement of firewood and wood products of all hardwood species out of these regulated areas.

  In addition, several other states and the province of Ontario, have bans or regulations in place concerning the importation or movement of firewood, of any species, as a means to prevent introduction or limit spread of any of the insect pests known to live in or on cut firewood. In addition, many States and Federal agencies, including United States Department of Agriculture Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA APHIS) and USDA Forest Service, have begun extensive outreach and public education campaigns to explain the dangers posed to forests from the movement of firewood, and encourage recreational users to “not move firewood.”

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In the Garden - An Executive’s 2nd Act - Tending an Upstate Oasis - NYTimes.com

• By ANNE RAVER

  Published: June 19, 2008

  COPAKE FALLS, N.Y.

• MY friend Suzanne and I headed out of the city last week for a leisurely wallow in an upstate garden: Margaret Roach’s personal paradise in the hills of Columbia County.
• This woman was living my dream — and the dream of so many other 50-somethings like us, who long to rekindle the creative fire that is snuffed out in the corporate world. And her garden blog was the best I’d ever seen. Her observations were so palpable I wanted to see the real thing.

Archinect : Books : Hybrids: Reshaping the Contemporary Garden in Metis

• 
• By Lesley Johnstone (Editor)

  The International Garden Festival, held each year in Quebec’s historic Jardins de Métis, is an internationally known tourist and design destination. The reshaping of the modern garden — a hybrid that draws from art and architecture, urban and industrial design, pop culture, and new technologies — is the focus of the festival and its designers. Challenging commonly held assumptions about what a garden is or can be, this book features imaginative, temporary works from the provocative to the playful, created for the festival by architects, landscape architects, and visual artists from Europe, the United States, Australia, and Canada. With text by 22 festival designers, the book offers a portrait of contemporary thinking on the art of the garden, as well as humans’ relationship to, and impact on, the physical world. From the theoretical and historical to the intensely personal, the insightful text explores what makes a garden such a rich site for innovation and experimentation.

Connections - The Forest Premeditated - Nurturing Illusions of Wildness in the New York Botanical Garden - NYTimes.com

• This garden in the Bronx, for example, began in 1891, when the New York State Legislature carved out 250 acres of the city’s undeveloped land for “the collection and culture of plants, flowers, shrubs and trees.” It was meant to advance “botanical science,” but would also provide “for the entertainment, recreation, and instruction of the people.” It was to be “a public botanic garden of the highest class,” in which visitors were as essential as the collection.
• Last week the garden received an institutional history it had commissioned from Heritage Landscapes, a landscape architecture and planning firm. The document is a cultural landscape report, which meticulously dissects the garden’s past, the better to see how the institution should execute its next master plan, requiring $479 million before 2015. (The report will be available to the public at the garden’s research library.)

Yale Environment 360: Bee Species Inventory
Shows Riches of Biodiversity

• A new inventory of bee species by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History notes more than 19,200 kinds, more than all species of birds and mammals put together. Among the myriad variations are many bees that do not make honey or live in colonies but are crucial pollinators for plants in their habitats. These less well-known species may prove useful as climate change forces shifts in agriculture systems, and as familiar bees suffer from colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon that has significantly reduced bee numbers in the U.S. The list of bee species is online and linked to maps that show where species live.