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Maureen

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    Maureen
    Lifetime Points: 849



    Location:
    Palm Springs, California
    About Me Professional horticulturist, garden designer and writer/photographer.
    Gardening Region View Map Region 5
    My Favorite Plants Cacti and succulents, herbs, native plants of the West.
    Plants Currently in My Garden My garden here in Palm Springs lives in a tropical desert and I strive to grow as wide a diversity of species as will tolerate our extreme summer heat. It was influenced by my mentor, Clark Moorten of Moorten Botanical Garden in town here. He is a collector of cacti and succulents. I maintain a huge collection of my own cacti and succulents, many rare and propagated from Clark's world class collection. But I also grow desert perennials in a cottage garden.
    I love to garden, because.... Gardening and the plant kingdom roots us into the earth. Plants also define locale more than anything else, and they have history with every culture, linking me in my little piece of ground with humanity around the globe.
    Biggest Gardening Challenge Here in Palm Springs it is unquestionably the extreme desert heat which can reach 120 degrees in the summer but averages about 110 for July and August.
    If I'm not gardening, I can be found: Riding my quarter horse Sassy out into the wildlands of the desert outside town, whhere trails go on FOREVER. I also escape the heat by going horse camping in the mountains during the summer.
    Other Hobbies I have always been creative and though my time is split between garden, horse and work, when there is leftover time I love to create glass mosaics which adorn my garden.

My California On Fire

Monday, August 17, 2009, 10:14 AM CST [General]

As if on schedule, California blew up into full scale fire season this weekend.  As a child of this state I have seen it before up close and personal. 

Last week I used this pix to show you where the Fremontia grows.  This is ground zero for the Yuba Fire, still chugging in the Yuba River canyon today.  Note the density of the manzanita, which burns so hot in a wood stove it will melt out cast iron just like coal.

Seven years ago I sold my mountain home in Yuba County, on the west slope of the the Sierra Nevada.  It is rugged country with the thickest brush and forest I've ever seen. Some years before we sold out of the fire zone after our neighborhood had burned heavily...twice.  At least a hundred homes were lost as we watched it from our smoke shrouded roof top, fire hoses in hand, hooked to a gasoline fired pump that tapped into our 3,500 gallon water tank.  We left all that equipment to the new owners, a very capable younger couple.

So this weekend when the news said Yuba County fire, I went to  CalFire.com and found the details.  It was my neighborhood, the fire started by a red tail hawk flying into the high power lines of Colgate Power plant, which sits in the bottom of the Yuba River canyon with its near vertical brush heavy walls.  This is inaccessible country and we always figured it would be hard fought if fire hit the canyon.

This last weekend our old town of Dobbins (just a post office) was evacuated and I'm sure the new owners stayed behind, up on the roof watching the greatest air show in the world.  With goggles and wet cloths around their mouths they no doubt saw dozens of air tankers and helicopters dipping into the small lakes and flying low over the ridge-tops.  These are the world's greatest pilots flying in blinding smoke over ridges topped with forty foot flames.

After moving to Palm Springs it took a year before I could relax when the hot winds blow.  Another year before the smell of smoke in summer heat didn't make me stop and watch for a tell-tale plume.  But the folks in Yuba County, once the most beautiful countryside in the world have seen at least three monster fires and dozens of small ones, aren't through yet.  And sadly, with the state of the overgrown forests up there, it won't be the last big burn.

 

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In Lewiston, Idaho we get smoke from nearby forest fires and local grass fires but thankfully nothing in town. I can't imagine the terror of up close fires raging. I've been to Palm Springs, and it's dry, too, but mostly desert around, right?

Anne
August 28, 2009
11:35 AM CST