Perhaps I should see this movie. I hear that it is pretty lame. I sort of wanted to see it because it was filmed in Cambria, about thirty miles to the northwest of where Brent and I were in our last year of studying horticulture at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo at the time. Yet, I never select movies. I always leave that up to whomever I am seeing the particular movie with. None of my friends ever wanted to see Arachnophobia. The one friend who you would think would want to see it because of where and when it was filmed wanted nothing to do with it. You see, Brent, the famous horticulturist and landscape designer who works outside where spiders live, is afflicted with Arachnophobia.
About a year before the filming of Arachnophobia began, in early 1988, Brent lived in Sequoia Hall at Cal Poly to the north of San Luis Obispo, and I lived south of town, about twenty minutes away. Brent called me up early one morning as I was getting ready to leave for school to tell me about a spider in his dorm room. Perhaps “tell” is not the best word to describe his frantic panic. I mean, he was totally freaked out!
I told him to wake up Jerry, his roommate who usually slept in a bit later, and have him remove the spider. He got even more frantic and told me that Jerry was up in the room. Well, . . . if Jerry was up in the room, and Brent was not with Jerry, I just had to ask, “Where are you?!” “I’m calling from the payphone in the lobby!”, Brent explained frantically. (Telephones were hardwired in 1988.) Okay, so this complicated things a bit. He actually ran from the room and down from the third floor before stopping long enough to use a telephone? I told Brent that he should go back up to his room and have Jerry remove the spider. He really freaked out, and exclaimed, “Are you not listening?! THERE IS A SPIDER UP THERE!!”
Somehow, after explaining that Jerry did not answer the telephone when he had tried to call a few time before calling me, Brent convinced me to rush over and stop by before class to remove the spider for him. Brent was in his pajamas without slippers when I met him in the lobby and proceeded up to his room, where Jerry had just woken up to find Brent gone and the door wide open. We both went to the lower left sill of the window where Brent had seen the terrifying spider, and found it, dead. Yes. . . dead. I rushed over there, parked in a red zone, rushed upstairs, all to kill . . . a dead spider.
Well, it was not exactly a dead spider. It was the molted exoskeleton of a spider. In retrospect, I should have told Brent either that it was a dead spider, or that we had found and killed it. You see, Brent and I studied entomology together, so we knew how this molting process worked for certain insects. Arachnids like mites and spiders use a similar technique. As they grow too large for their external skeletal structure, they shed it, and then hide out somewhere while their new exterior hardens into a new exoskeleton. So when I told Brent that we found the molted exoskeleton, he freaked out all over again knowing that the spider was still hiding in his room, and that it was BIGGER!
I do not remember how Jerry and I got Brent to go home the following evening. Perhaps his second best option was to come to my house, where spiders were quite common. We never actually saw the spider.
From a simple picture, Spanish bayonet, Yucca aloifolia, is indistinguishable from the common giant yucca. The narrow leaves are about two feet long, and flare upward and outward from terminal buds. Plump conical trusses of waxy white flowers with purplish highlights stand vertically just above the foliage. The main difference is that the leaves are more rigid than they appear to be, with nastily sharp terminal spines.
There are many reasons why fireplaces and their chimneys are not such a safety concern like they were decades ago. Only a few modern homes are even equipped with them. Installation of a new fireplace is outlawed in many municipalities, even if a fireplace gets damaged by an earthquake, and should be replaced. Urban sprawl has replaced almost all of the orchards and woods that once supplied affordable fuel.
Like redwoods, the cork oak, Quercus suber, is a ‘pyrophyte’, which means that it survives forest fires that burn off competing vegetation. The trunks and main limbs are insulated with a very thick bark. Only the foliage and smaller stems burn off. After a fire, the upper limbs of cork oak regenerate new foliage while other less fortunate plants start over from their roots or seed at ground level.
Of all the gardening chores, planting dormant bulbs is probably the least gratifying. All we do is dig a hole to the required depth and width, set a few unimpressively dormant bulbs with the correct orientation and spacing, and then fill the hole with the same soil that was removed from it. The process gets repeated until all the bulbs are planted. Soil amendment and fertilizer might be added.
Gardening is not for everyone. If you are reading this, you probably enjoy gardening. There are many more people who simply are not interested in it. Some tend to their own gardens in a basic manner just to keep their homes looking good. Most hire gardeners to maintain their landscapes for them.
Main Street and Santa Cruz Avenue are the two main streets of downtown Los Gatos. They are the main shopping district, and the part of town that everyone sees. As much as things have changed, a bit of the familiar remains. Gilley’s Coffee Shoppe is still next door to the (rebuilt) Los Gatos Cinema. The brick La Canada Building miraculously survived the Earthquake. The simple deco Park Vista Building across the street is just as elegant now as it was a century ago. There are still concerts in the Town Plaza in summertime, shaded by the Town Christmas Tree that gets lit up in December.
Bluegum is famously problematic. It is too big, too invasive, too messy, too structurally deficient, and as demonstrated in the Oakland fire, too combustible. Dwarf bluegum, Eucalyptus globulus ‘Compacta’, is a completely different animal that does not even look related. It gets only about fifty feet tall, with a dense and somewhat symmetrically rounded canopy. The mess and falling limbs do not affect such a large area.
Shortly after germinating and producing their first few leaves, many seedlings start to produce foliage that is indistinguishable from the foliage that they will produce for the rest of their lives. Other plants might initially be outfitted with leaves that are smaller, thicker, or somehow slightly different from what will appear later. Then there are those that produce juvenile growth that is completely distinct from later adult growth.
