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All of the banner background photos on this site were taken by Whitey.
Above is a close-up of the bark of incense-cedar (Calocedrus decurrens) in winter.
Part of the Food Garden in early May. Strawberries in left foreground protected from squirrels with metal mesh "exclosure." 'Buttercrunch' lettuce at center left ready to eat, and newly transplanted lettuce seedlings to their right covered with bamboo mat to prevent wilting until they're over their transplant shock. Chard plants covered with "row cover" fabric to protect them from leaf miner moths. Potatoes beyond the chard. And rambunctious broccoli and cauliflower plants--started early when the metal structure they're growing in was covered with plastic.
Yet another “unseasonably dry” May is now underway here in Oregon’s Upper Willamette Valley. Is this yet another “new normal”? Sigh. I can’t believe that I’ve been watering my native landscape the past couple of days to keep the spring wildflowers from wilting. Not that wilting will truly hurt them, but I just feel a bit sorry for plants that look like that.
The Food Garden is well underway with a surfeit of lettuce—both ‘Salad Bowl’ and ‘Buttercrunch’ (the latter my favorite)—as well as the end of 2025’s chard and the beginning of 2026’s chard. The broccoli and cauliflower plants are thriving and I’m daily looking them over for so-called cabbage worms (larvae) that have hatched from eggs laid by the omnipresent cabbage moths. My hens simply gobble up the juicy larvae that I give them, thank you very much.
The season is a week or more in advance of “average” for many plants but curiously some plants are almost a full month ahead of schedule. The black locusts and Lavalle hawthorns, for instance, typically bloom the first week of Eugene, but they’re almost finished. Hmm.
Up in the West Cascades, most of the neotropical migrants—warblers, vireos, thrushes, and the like—are now back, and the forest is alive with birdsong, especially early in the morning. Just yesterday, during a visit, I heard black-throated gray warblers, MacGillivray’s warblers, hermit warblers, a hermit thrush, and a Hutton’s vireo—besides the usual suspects that inhabit the forests year-round (Pacific wrens, red-breasted nuthatches, pileated woodpeckers, red-breasted sapsuckers, Steller’s jays, and brown creepers).
And Life goes on!
Most Americans would look at this photo and say, "Yummy radishes!" They would be focused on the roots, of course. But some of us know that radish leaves can be used to make a splendid spring soup. (I learned this from the French when living there fifty years ago.) Although I ate a few of these radish roots, the rest went to the compost silo and the leaves became potage aux fanes de radis or radish-leaf soup!
In bloom every May in Oregon's West Cascades is orange honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa). Isn't it stunning? Imagine being the insect--or the hummingbird?--that pollinates these flowers!
(This page updated 12 May 2026.)
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