If you Google “cinder garden” you’ll likely get lots results for DIY gardens made of cinder blocks. There is also a much more beautiful and natural interpretation of “cinder garden”. Natural cinder gardens, also called “Devil’s gardens” exemplify resilience and the circle of life. These gardens form as an early step in the reclamation process […]
Are these watermelons? Petrified watermelons, melon rocks, melon gravel – these are all names for basalt boulders scattered across the Snake River corridor. While the process of petrification can turn organic material like watermelons into stone, watermelons did not even exist when these rock monoliths were formed. The colloquial name “petrified watermelons” comes from a […]
Remember that time you watched Jurassic Park at age 7 and spent the next five years convinced you had to hide under the covers and not breathe or else the T-Rex would get you? If we’ve learned anything from Jurassic Park, it’s that life will find a way, and not just dinosaurs. Plants are plotting […]
🎵 O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain 🎵 Not so fast! This might be Idaho, one the nation’s top producers of hay, wheat, and barley, but those are not shining seas of beautiful grains. This is cheatgrass. What is cheatgrass? Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), also known as downy brome, is a fast […]
If you’ve ever been to Florida or other nearby warm-weather destinations, you’ve likely seen the inception-esque forest scene where there is a plant, on a plant, on a plant, creating a hairy forest hobo. These are Tillandsia of the Bromeliad family, commonly called air plants. Air plants are epiphytes, meaning they derive moisture and nutrients […]
I listen to a sound machine to fall asleep and crashing waves is one of my go-to sounds. As a lie there picturing a beach scene I inevitably envision a classic sandy beach with deep blue water full of soothing waves breaking on the shore. Except, as some point the blue of the ocean turns […]
It’s 1100 CE and you are house hunting on the Colorado Plateau near the Little Colorado River in modern day Arizona. Peering over the rim of Walnut Canyon, you notice centuries of wind and water have eroded the softer limestone layers of the canyon wall to carve recessed ledges protected from the worst of the […]
