Cornus 'Winter Flame'

The Winter Flame Dogwood has about the most orange twigs and foliage imaginable while still looking natural and fitting into a native landscape. The orange foliage looks great in this muted terracotta pot.

Acer grisium

The Acer grisium or Paperbark Maple is tall rustic Maple tree that blends into a forest line or canopy row without drawing too much attention or appearing too cultivated. The Paperbark Maple will look like it's always been there while bringing year round interest with its simple green Maple leaves and pealing red bark.

Parthenocissus leaf

This lone, baby Parthenocissus tricuspidata leaf on a weathered teak table captures more light than any landscape scene I've seen in awhile.

Kiwi vine trunk

In this photo you can see a little glimpse of the huge 8" girth of this old Kiwi vine. It's like an anaconda climbing up the post!

Kiwi vine

I guess I should know better, but I always thought the Kiwi fruit came from a tree. Apparently Kiwis grow on a vine. This awesome, huge Kiwi vine covers this trellis. The vine trunk is about 8" thick. The owner of this retail nursery in Woodside, CA started this vine from a 1 gallon size container in the 1950's!

lawn spiders

Has anyone seen anything like this before? The entire lawn is covered with a blanket of spider webs. You can only see the webs in the Sun's reflections, but it covers the whole lawn. I've always thought of spiders as loners that spin their own web and live a solitary life, but this is obviously some kind of community or spider city! I'd love to know what kind of spider this is.

freshly picked green olives

The mission olive, Olea europaea, in our front yard is covered in olives so we are going to take a pass at curing them for gifts and a few just for us.
We easily collected enough olives to fill a 3 gallon bucket just from picking the olives off the lower branches that we could reach without a ladder.
We have read many different curing methods and recipes, and we are going to attempt our own version from what we have learned. We started off by checking each olive for bug bits, throwing away the bad ones and cutting a small slice in all the good ones to help leach out the bitters from the olives.
We are now on day 4 of soaking the olives in water, and I'll write more later to let you know how it's going.