Local Ecologist

China Dialogue reported on the use of water hyacinth as the foundation - literally - of hydroponic farming in Bangladesh . The innovative food gardening technique was developed to cope with increasing and unpredictable rain events. It is also used as a food security measure. I emailed a forester-botanist friend in Bangladesh asking if she had heard of hyacinth farming. She wrote back noting that the technique is known as "doob chash" (trans: "float farm"), was developed by "the people themselves," has been practiced "for at least ten years," and helps to eliminate an invasive plant (water hyacinth). Source: "Introduction of floating gardening in the north-eastern wetlands of Bangladesh for nutritional security and sustainable livelihood," by Haseeb Md. Irfanullah1, Ahana Adrika1, Abdul Ghani, Zakir Ahmed Khan, and Md. Abdur Rashid, published in Renewable Agriculture and Food System. The photograph is courtesy of Haseeb Md. Irfanul

Our summer trip to Chicago was recently showcased in a recent photo-tour of some of the city's lakeside parks . Today we offer a short reading list in no particular order. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America - Erik Larson Constructing Chicago - Daniel M. Bluestone Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West - William Cronon "Chicago Waters" (article) - Susan Power Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago - Eric Klinenberg "People and the River: Perception and Use of Chicago Waterways for Recreation" ( report ) - Paul H. Gobster and Lynne M. Westphal Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 - Arnold R. Hirsch Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 - Allan H. Spear The Jungle - Upton Sinclair

The Garden The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis. The Garden follows the plight of the farmers, from the tilled soil of this urban farm to the polished marble of City Hall. Mostly immigrants from Latin America, from countries where they feared for their lives if they were to speak out, we watch them organize, fight back, and demand answers: Why was the land sold to a wealthy developer for millions less than fair-market value? Why was the transaction done in a closed-door session of the LA City Council? Why has it never been made public? And the powers-that-be have the same response: “The g

Finally I was able to log my Pigeon Watch site on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Celebrate Urban Birds website . You can see my site on the map below. I have not made any systematic observations at my birdwatch since June but there seem to be many more pigeons at the site. At home, the hummingbirds were back for a week or two. In other bird news, I found a nest in the quince tree outside my living room window and a dust bath in the front garden. About the dust bath Leon Augustus Hausman writes, One piece of apparatus, frequently overlooked when one is equipping a bird-attracting station, is the dust bath. This is almost as necessary as a water bath....Birds take dust baths to help rid themselves of skin parasites, particularly the so-called bird lice. Hausman recommends a tray of dry road dust. My dust bath is very informal. It's a mix of garden and bagged soil that I left unplanted in the garden. Note the bowl shape as well as the mounds of soil in the photograph above. La

A professor once said - about finding interesting books in the library - browse around the book you intend to borrow. Following his advice I found "There, There: East San Francisco Bay At Your Feet" by Margot Patterson Doss. (I cannot recall the book I intended to borrow.) At the time her book was published, Doss wrote two walking columns, "San Francisco At Your Feet" and "The Bay Area At Your Feet," for the SF Chronicle. Doss died in 2003. An obituary was printed in the Chronicle dated January 17, 2003. One of the "There, There" is titled "Continental Ways in Berkeley" which I retraced, in part and in reverse. Doss began at Shattuck and Cedar and ended at 1481 Shattuck. I started at the Bing Wong Laundry and ended at Poulet on Shattuck and Virginia (not mentioned in Doss's walk). Several of the shops on Doss's route are no longer in business. Pig by the Tail Charcuterie. Berkeley Fish Company. Birkenstock Shoe Store.

The cours, a garden allee style carriage way, was introduced to France from Italy by Queen Marie de Medici in 1616. Henry W. Lawrence, in the article "Origins of the Tree-Lined Boulevard," writes [Marie de Medici] had a new type of quadruple allee installed along the banks of the Seine below the Tuileries. The new feature, the Cours de la Reine, was especially for carriage riding. The form was apparently inspired by the roadway, known as the Corso, along the Arno River outside Florence....The cours was especially important because it transformed the garden allee into a place for vehicles. The cours and garden allee, according to Lawrence, are two of ten precursors to the tree-lined boulevards of the nineteenth century, popularized by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann in Paris. Lawrence's expansion of the "Origins" article is now available in book form - "City Trees: A Historical Geography from the Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century." Photogr

Join me on a photographic procession from downtown Chicago along six miles of lakeshore to Wooded Island. Approaching downtown via Lakeshore Boulevard Sears Tower with the Gold Coast on the right The El or elevated train). I took The El twice; from State/Lake to Howard (Rogers Park) on the red line and from Howard to The Loop on the purple line. Approaching Millennium Park Skyline view via the Cloud Gate Observing users at Cloud Gate Shang sculpture by di Suervo. Notice the interaction with the piece. According to a description on a park sign, the artist “encourages visitors to walk through, on and around his sculpture.” Crown Fountain offers different ways to experience water From the Great Lawn towards Pritzker Pavilion Another way to experience water at Millennium Park is in Lurie Garden. Chicago is known for its unbearably hot summers. The devastating heat wave of 1995 is chronicled by Eric Klinenberg in "Heat Wave." Lurie Garden Going across the bridge to Grant Par

Carl F. Horowitz, author of "The Garden Apartment" (1983) writes that this residential form was "an innovation of the early-1920s," inspired by Ebenezer Howard's garden city concept. Howard envisioned the garden city supporting populations of up to 30,000 people, with local employment, and surrounded by a greenbelt of agricultural and wooded areas. Horowitz points to Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, NY, designed by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, as the first garden apartment in the U.S., followed by the more suburban model at Radburn, New Jersey, also designed by Stein and Wright. Horowitz offers several "universal attributes" of a garden apartment: rental tenure; low-rise design; floor plan is on one level; clustered open space; apartments are on the same tract of land; and semi-private exterior doorways. I am skeptical about the universality of the first element - rental tenure - but I strongly agree with the remaining features. Fox Court is a local

1. BOND(ing) PARK(ing) on Center Street, September 19, 2008, 9 to 5 pm Berkeley has a history of pioneering park provision and park design. The Berkeley PARK(ing) Day (Original concept was by REBAR. www.rebargroup.org) continues this tradition on Friday September 19, 2008. Berkeley Partners for Parks will host the BOND(ing) PARK(ing) on Center Street between Oxford and Shattuck beginning at 9 AM and continuing through 5 PM to showcase the importance of and need for parks and open space in our communities. Enjoy the PARK: sit, people-watch, talk, and learn about and support Berkeley’s park measure (HH) and the East Bay Park District’s Bond Measure WW, i.e. the extension of Measure AA – passed in 1988 and which has supported the preservation of 34,000 acres of open space and the construction of over 100 miles of new trails and the development of hundreds of local parks and recreation projects. Visions for the potential public plaza with creek/water feature on this very block of Cente

On a recent Saturday, six cyclists left from Fruitvale BART in Oakland, Calif. to tour Arrowhead Marsh and the creeks of the San Leandro Bay. The tour included the confluence of the Courtland and Peralta Creeks, the confluence of the Arroyo Viejo and San Leandro Creeks, Bay Farm Island in Alameda, and Arrowhead Marsh (from above it looks like an arrowhead). The tour leader, Grey K., staff at Cycles of Change, showed the group a new marsh (above right), engineered from a Port of Oakland parking lot after the Golden Gate Audubon Society and Save the Bay successfully sued the Port for attempting to develop a casino on the site. (Bay Nature wrote about the first development attempt in 2005.) Courtland Creek, and its confluence with Peralta Creek Confluence of Arroyo Viejo and San Leandro Creeks The City of Oakland was certainly named for its oaks but a comment by Moses Chase might be directly responsible for the city's name: Once when Moody [who traded oak lumber for land from

Les of A Tidewater Gardener identified the Le Conte locusts as Robinia pseudoacacia 'Purple Robe.' (Thank you Les.) The illusive "Illustrated Guide to the Street Tree Planting Program" published by the City of Berkeley lists the tree as Robinia ambigua 'Purple Robe.' The guide is available at the reference desk of the Berkeley Library's central branch; it is not available online.