Playing along with the theme of more traditional fall accents and how best to feature them for maximum impact,several thoughts come to mind. First, fall foliage color shows best against darker greens of evergreen or coniferous trees, or buildings. Fall foliage will tend to last longest if trees are sited to protect them from strong winds. This is particularly useful to remember with Gingko trees here in northern California. Drifts of shrubs with fall foliage color have greater impact than single accents, and more pleasing still is to combine variations on a color theme. We can often get very good fall foliage color here in coastal California with the right choices, and summer drought stress can even give early fall color on trees as early as August. Fall flowers can just as easily be vivid saturated tones here in a Mediterranean climate such as California's. Some of my favorites include vivid satiny fluorescent pinks of Nerine bowdenii and. Schizostylis coccinea or softer pinks of towering 20 foot tall Dahlia imperialism or chrysanthemum -like Tree Daisies such as Montanoa grandiflora which also smell like freshly baked sugar cookies in fall bloom. As well, there are almost too many fall flowering Cloudforest Salvias species for prominent end of the year bloom here, in jewel tones of deep blues, burgundy, rose pink, lavenders, and yellows. Salvias such as S. wagneriana, involucrata, splendens 'vanhoutei' to name just a few. I personally find it more fun to plan/design for massive fall blooms mixed with more traditional fall foliage than a big spring bling. In fact, the start of the fall rainy season here locally really is our equivalent of new growth and the native flora waking up again after 6 months of no rain. So really, October is our true spring as it heralds the hillsides turning green again, and the first flowers of natives such as Ribes sanguineum come as early as November.

The NWS has issued a Red Flag Fire Warning for Jay's corner of Kansas for tomorrow afternoon. I've linked it below. Here is a link that might be useful: NWS Webpage

The extinction of the North American megafauna was almost certainly not due to any one event or cause - major factors likely included increased human predation; novel diseases introduced by humans and other animals crossing land bridges; and climate change (which would have altered flora, as well). No one would necessarily have been enough to wipe out the megafauna, but the combined effects were too much to survive. The bison was the largest herbivore to survive the event, and the grizzly the largest predator. There were much larger animals on this continent at one time. We also had an impressive range of big cats. Jaguars did once range as far north as Washington state and Nebraska, but no later than the Pleistocene (for those not familiar with geologic time periods, the Pliocene was from approx. 5 MYA to 1.6 MYA and the Pleistocene from 1.6 MYA to .01 MYA. From .01 MYA to the present is known as the Holocene). Jaguars were typically found where North American lions were absent (which had reached Peru by the Pleistocene). Both were also larger than their surviving modern day counterparts. We also had tigers in Alaska during the last 100,000 years! Sabertooth cats were present in many parts of North America during the Pliocene and Pleistocene. These included Dinofelis, Nimravides (over 3' tall at the shoulder), Machairodus (almost 4' tall at the shoulder), Homotherium and Smilodon (the famous La Brea fossils are S. fatalis). Smilodon populator, larger than the La Brea specimens, was the size of a large lion (4' tall at the shoulder). The cheetahs that populated North America (Miracinonyx) were larger than African cheetahs, and less specialized for speed; there were also European cheetahs that were larger as well and were believed to have had the heavier coats of a northern animal (like a snow leopard or Siberian tiger). They would have done fine in Wyoming in the winter. Alas, African cheetahs would not. Still, imagine what our continent would be like if these big cats were around today! Alan Turner's "The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives" is a great (if technical) read about the living and extinct great cats.

We purposely moved to our neighbourhood because it has a "high street". That's two blocks away. It's changed over the last 8 years...now we have an antique mall, two funky galleries, some hair salons, loads of restraunts, many bars, a great coffee shop, THREE tatoo parlors, two banks, fire department, public library (these were very important to me), and a few more blocks away several fast food joints (which I do not use). There are also some very dubious corner stores and gas stations, which frequently have people hanging out and drinking or selling drugs or fronting prostitution. 1 mile down the main road in either direction are two different outdoor malls. They clearly cater to different types of clientle. One has a Super Giant Foods, Dollar General, Citi Fashions, Fashion Cents and a strange jumbled beauty supply store and a furniture rental center. The other has a Kroger, Lowes, Linens & Things, Target, Best Buy, Ross and several other small locally owned resteraunts and stores that are sort of funky and fun. Even closer to us is a small development with an upscale hair salon, a gym, pizza, coffee, dance studio...this is a fantastic place for our community and most of the people who work there live in the immediate community. Has this raised the value of our home? Not really. It hasn't raised the value (we bought at $75,000 and it's worth $265,000 and not fully renovated yet...that increase in 8 years!!)...the value has been steadily increasing due to our 3 minute drive to downtown location. It's also just one of the most desirable neighbourhoods in the city to buy into, although not so easy now with the price increases. Frankly, our neighbourhood is weird. We have two familys with drug dealers, one with a gang memeber on our street. There is constantly men sitting around ALL DAY LONG drinking, the mothers of their children coming and screaming for money, their older children running drugs...(I know it sounds like something the police can handle, but they have bigger fish to fry around here). The next street over has none of this nonsense and is beautiful, quiet, friendly. We knew what it was like when we moved here. Why did we move here? Because the afformentioned high street was an indication of the culture that this area also holds. It's the neighbourhood of artists, artizans, indepenant thinkers, street poets, wacky gardeners, musicians, teachers who think outside the box...people who thrive on the strange juxdiposition of our community. That is why the value of our homes has increased. Demand. GGG