Allogenic Dance

We have a family tradition, begun our second year in our Maryland house, of buying a live landscaping tree/large shrub as our Christmas Tree to plant out after the holidays.  The first year in the Maryland House my trusty Norfolk Island pine, my live Christmas tree for 6 years, was decorated with ornaments, tinsel and presents.  Then it croaked in a sudden violent shedding of all needles as soon as we returned from Christmas at my parents.  So the following year we got a real tree and moved it  outside wrapped in a sheet in a sheltered and warmish location while we visited the grandparents.  We eventually accumulated a spruce, japanese maple, mountain laurel, deodor cedar, and a white pine.  And then we moved leaving our odd little specimen forest behind.  Now of course on Oahu we are surrounded by Cook and Norfolk Island Pines grown to heights that would never fit in our house. In 2020 the live Christmas tree was a mele kalikimaka banana.  Which died back in a slosh and then resprout

Updated 6/14/2018 2:27pm HST, originally published 6/9/2018 I intended the next post to be about searching for a home on Oahu.  But the media is obsessed with Kilauea.  Ignore the news media.  Except they keep making us sound like we are all going to die... Folks on Hawaii Island are having a hard time.  If you haven't heard, Kilauea on Hawaii continues to erupt, the most recent eruption actually began in 1983, the location of the fissures and the flow are somewhat new.  One fissure is fountaining lava, which produces Pele's hair (lovely wafting glass filaments that are murder on human tissue) and gases, and lava.  Once the lava flow hits the ocean it produces  laze , which is very dangerous to anyone in the immediate vicinity.  Therefore  Hawaii County Civil Defense  is keeping everyone out of the immediate vicinity. But Kilauea is not Mt. St. Helens, people.  Mt. St. Helens is part of the Ring of Fire, with a different amount of silica in it's magma/lava, leading to

USGS Hawaii Science Center After 15 years as a water resources specialist / aquatic ecologist with a federal agency on the East Coast of the United States, my family and I moved to the island of Oahu in the State of Hawaii in December.  We still cannot believe we are here, but it is not as alien as everyone warned it would be.  For me it is a mashup of southern Florida, San Diego and Costa Rica. I now live 4  USDA hardiness zones south of any growing zone I've ever tried (I grew up in 8a, Oahu is 12a) and know nothing of palm physiology or volcanic island ecology really.  I have no idea what the plants are I see everywhere, what is native, where the non-natives originated... I have never lived, worked or studied a volcanic area.  And besides island biogeography, not much experience with an isolated island chain.  So where do I start? When in doubt, I start with the United States Geological Survey.  They do so much more than geology.  The Pacific Region of USGS has 9