My March 2025 essay was entitled GARDENING INJURIES: OUCH or worse! Near the end of that piece I very briefly discussed allergic reactions. Mind you, one could do books on the topic as there are lots of unrelated plants that can cause some sort of immune response, as well as considerable individual susceptibility and various contributing factors. This month I will describe a specific example but need you to understand that I am doing so in the context of another topic -- considering the...

Borrowing from the Monty Python Flying Circus intro, now for something a little different . I recently introduced and for this month's offering will direct you to the yellow home page bar entitled and linked to THE LIST. It is a self-explanatory 15-page read that those of you brave enough to peruse will find interesting, in part shocking, and certainly revealing -- brave because part of my intent was to overwhelm, cause you to think WOW or OH MY. The idea for THE LIST came to me after...

I am fond of conifers. One of my favs is what we call larches ( Larix spp.). These coniferous trees produce 1-2-inch-long flat and delicate leaves that are pleasantly soft to the touch. The branches are dimorphic. The needle thin leaves are arranged individually on new shoots but in older stems they are located in brush-like clusters at the end of spur-like shoots. The emerging fascicle (10-40 leaves per, depending on species) looks something like a basally attached sea creature with...