ByGD
Himalayan blackberry is everywhere in the Pacific Northwest. It’s the tastiest noxious weed ever, so it’s hard to get too upset about it. But it does displace some native species that also deserve our love. Case in point: salmonberry. Probably named for orangey-pink of its berries, salmon berry is much prettier than blackberry. Maybe the berries are not as tasty, but the prickles are less vicious. And they do belong here.
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Violets are an old fashioned flower that seem to be coming back into fashion. It’s funny that such a small, demure flower should be bred into the showy pansy popular at hardware stores. I like those too, but I prefer the original woodland flower. Bonus points for the Pacific Northwest native variety.
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I used to live in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle. Legend has it that the neighborhood was named by sailors, who saw a bluff covered with beautiful white flowers. Thinking they were magnolias, they named it Magnolia bluff. April Fools on the sailors! They were actually madronas – an endemic Pacific Northwest species with a beautiful mottled red bark and exquisite white flowers.
But the joke is on the natives. Madronas are a sensitive species. They don’t transplant well and they are sensitive to soil conditions and disturbances. Magnolias do grow well here, and they are very pretty. Nowadays you are more likely to see a magnolia in flower in Seattle than a madrona.
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©2017 Mark Kitaoka Property of Village Theatre
It was just another Wednesday… no, it was a Thursday when I braved I-90 to get to Village Theatre in Issaquah for a performance of their original production, String. I’d been pitching a story about how String, the first musical to complete both Village Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals and Beta Series, was a sign of things to come from Village Theatre’s Originals program. I still think there’s a story there, but apparently, I’m not the person to sell it. Anyway, I got to see String, and I’m glad about that. Read More
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Perhaps in Europe the rose has more cultural significance, but here in the Pacific Northwest, as in Japan, roses take a back seat to cherry blossoms. Just on my two-block-long street, there are so many varieties that you can tell the date between February and June by which ones are in bloom. Some are so ethereal and pale, like lace. Some are dense pink pom poms. A few are almost completely white and one is almost dark enough to call red. The flowers on my fruiting cherry tree are not the most remarkable, but they do mark the end of the season. I’m not in a hurry for my own tree to blossom. I’ll enjoy marking the time as the others bloom up and down the street.