Month: October 2023

under the toyon

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I spent a quiet half hour with the hummingbird sage under a toyon tree, enjoying the colours, the coolness, and the calls of oak titmouse, red-shouldered hawk, white-breasted nuthatch, and acorn woodpecker. Time under trees is an essential component of my mental and physical health—is it for you?

4-direction landscapitos

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I sat in the garden and sketched in the four cardinal directions. Not pictured: the Anna’s hummingbird on the bougainvillea.

I live on USA’s west coast, but the coastline actually runs east-west here, so the ocean is to the south of us. It was interesting how the sky colour was so different in each direction (this was done mid-afternoon.)

In the top image, those are not two electric poles. The one to the left is a raptor pole that K built. It gets good use by owls!

Pieris rapae

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The cabbage whites (Pieris rapae) are all over my brassicas, of course, but I’m also seeing them in the Park and on ornamentals in the neighbourhood. They seem to especially like purple lantana flowers. Do they also lay their eggs on the plant? Do their larvae eat the leaves, as they do my kale?

On the subject of lantana, it’s highly invasive where I‘m from. It covers an estimated four million hectares in eastern Australia, often to the exclusion of wildlife, people and livestock. So it’s taken me a long while to get used to seeing it as a cultivated garden plant here in Southern California.

Eat up, cabbage whites—lantana not kale!