Sea dahlias

It’s sea dahlia time, both in our garden and what’s been preserved of San Diego’s coastal strand and coastal sage scrub. Once these perennials finish flowering for the year, they’ll enter summer dormancy and receive very little garden water. I trim the leaves once they’re brown and accept that having some “dead” sticks in the yard is worth it for the show they put on in the spring. They reseed easily if you let them—I’ve even got some popping up in my giant pot of spare coastal cholla pieces which is somehow a thing I have.

View from the Guy Fleming Trail at Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve.

Backlit beauty

I watched this California ground squirrel inhale blossom after blossom after snacking on Phacelia leaves.

Katydid nymph in our garden. Visit the California Native Plant Society-San Diego Chapter’s seed shop if you’d like to grow this plant yourself.

Great white sharks!

The water has been calm around here as of late and I knew the conditions were perfect for spotting sharks and other ocean life from the cliffs at Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve. I was super excited to see three juvenile great white sharks as well as harbor seals and nearshore bottlenose dolphins.

It might be tough to see them on a smartphone screen, but there’re two sharks here—one at the far left and one on the right.

It’s pretty easy to tell the dolphins and sharks apart even at a distance.

It’s a delight having harbor seals whiz past me when I’m snorkeling.

Walking while (overly) aware

I wonder how many people have passed this live oak in Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve over the years without pulling knives on it and inviting pathogens for a picnic? Weak appeals to tradition could be made to justify new arborglyphs, none of which hold much water when we’re talking about trees in nature preserves; what these clowns did is no Chumash “scorpion tree.”

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There’re still flowers to see in San Diego other than invasive mustard and ice plants despite our minimal rainfall over the winter. I enjoy the hunt.

brownspined pricklypear (Cylindropuntia californica var. parkeri), Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve

red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus), Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve

lanceleaf liveforever (Dudleya lanceolata), Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve

coyote (Canis latrans), Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve

climbing milkweed (Funastrum cynanchoides var. hartwegii), Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve

San Diego barrel cactus (Ferocactus viridescens var. viridescens) with pink sand verbena (Abronia umbellata), Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve

sacred datura (Datura wrightii), Torrey Pines State Beach

San Diego goldenstar (Bloomeria clevelandii), Louis Stelzer County Park

delicate clarkia (Clarkia delicata), Louis Stelzer County Park

San Bernardino larkspur (Delphinium parryi), Louis Stelzer County Park

A cherrypicked view from Kumeyaay Promontory at Louis Stelzer County Park sans enormous powerlines.

This is on the way to our trash and recycling bins. I suppose it's my version of a container garden. It started a couple of years ago with some Calorchortus weedii var. intermedius bulbs from Telos Rare Bulbs. Wildlife kept eating the emerging leaves, so I chucked in some Opuntia prolifera cladodes that had fallen from the one I planted at the end of the driveway. The Eschscholzia californica is a volunteer from elsewhere in the yard. Maybe next spring will finally be the year for that C. weedii.

Every day is Earth Day

It hurts to watch organisms we love dearly die, particularly when it wasn't their time to go. And it’s difficult to be in the company of people who don't accept that anthropogenic climate change is the real deal.