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Chinese Gardens

Chinatown

12th July 1834 saw the death in Hawaii of Botanist, David Douglas.

As promised last month a more detailed account of this not so well known Scot.

David Douglas was born in the village of Scone on June 25, 1799, just north of Perth he is much better known in the US state of Oregon, where their state tree “The Douglas Fir” is named after him Douglas was the son of stonemason John Douglas and Jean Drummond. He attended local schools, and by the time he was eleven, he was working as a gardener for local landowners, the Earl of Mansfield and Sir Robert Preston.

While working at the Botanical Garden in Glasgow, he became acquainted with the garden’s curator, Stewart Murray, and British botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker. Douglas attended Hooker’s lectures and had access to private libraries. Hooker later described him as a person of “great activity, singular abstemiousness, and energetic zeal.”

In 1823, on Hooker’s recommendation, the Royal Horticultural Society chose Douglas as a botanical collector. The Society intended to send Douglas to China, but arrangements fell through so he ended up going to eastern North America. In 1824, he found passage on a Hudson’s Bay Company vessel, the William and Ann, and arrived in Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River on April 7, 1825. Among his duties were keeping a journal of his activities and collecting seeds and plant specimens that might be useful as horticultural plants in England. Douglas visited North America four times, three times to the Pacific Northwest and California to look for plants, particularly fruit trees, forest trees, and oaks.

On his 1826 trip to present-day Oregon, Douglas took careful notes on the local vegetation as he traveled up the Willamette Valley. On September 30, he recorded one of the earliest descriptions of the Indian use of fire: “Most parts of the country burned; only on little patches in the valleys and on the flats near low hills that verdure is to be seen. Some of the natives tell me it is done for the purpose of urging the deer to frequent certain parts, to feed, which they leave unburned, and of course they are easily killed. Others say it is done in order that they might the better find wild honey and grasshoppers, which both serve as articles of winter food.“

In October, he traveled farther south to near present-day Roseburg on the Umpqua River, primarily to collect the cones of the sugar pine . On October 26, he described an encounter with a local man who led him to the “long-wished-for pines.” While shooting the cones out of a tall tree, which Douglas described as hanging at the tips of branches “like small sugar-loaves in a grocer’s shop,” he attracted several Natives who seemed “anything but friendly.” After a tense standoff, one man indicated that they wanted tobacco, and Douglas responded that he would oblige them if they brought him more cones. The men went in one direction, and Douglas with three cones and a twig went in another.

Douglas was interested in all aspects of the landscape, including animals. Those named in his honour range from the pigmy short-horned lizard to the Douglas squirrel ( . He shipped a number of specimens home for examination by leading scientists. Some species, such as the mountain beaver , were new to science. Douglas also reported seeing—and shooting—California condors on the Columbia River.

In 1827, Douglas traveled through the Northern Rockies and then to York Factory on Hudson Bay before returning to London. He worked on his collections until October 1829, when he again traveled to Fort Vancouver. He spent time on the California coast in 1831-1832, collecting plants and animals and making geographic observations. In 1832, on his return to the Columbia River, he made his first visit to the Hawaiian Islands. He explored the Fraser River district in 1833 and left the Northwest on October 18, 1833, for a return trip to the Hawaiian Islands and a planned return to London.

Douglas had been intrigued by Hawaii and wanted to continue collecting. Unable to get prompt transportation to England, he spent extra time in the islands. It was there, on July 12, 1834, that he met his end,apparently trampled by a bullock in a deep pit designed to capture cattle, although foul play has been suspected.

Douglas introduced more than two hundred Pacific Northwest plants home, many of them important in our gardens today, including Oregon’s red-flowering currant.

At Scone Palace, near Douglas’s birthplace, stands a magnificent Douglas-fir, grown from seed that he sent back from western North America in 1826. His introduction of Sitka spruce to Britain forms the basis of that country’s modern conifer forestry.

Douglas was a tireless botanist and natural historian whose name is honoured in more than eighty species of plants and animals. David Douglas High School in Portland is named for him, a peak in the Rockies as well as numerous plants, are also named after him.

Pics are of Douglas, his memorials at Scone, in Hawaii and Vancouver.

See Our Lowboy Trailer Load a Massive Crane

Whenever they're on fire, or it's too hot, some states have absolutely tried to sneak in cuddles with Alaska.

Like one morning as he's getting breakfast he tries to go back to the garage and almost falls because there are Nevada and Oregon clutching onto his legs.

He's woken up to find California cuddling with him more then once.

He doesn't really mind it, for the most part. It's kinda amusing. Not that he'd ever admit it.

Also I looked up which states have the worst wildfires and Texas seems to be number two, right behind California every time

US — Medford, Oregon. “I do not value human life very much,” a killer of two, now serving a sentence in a women’s prison, said in a taped confession. “My feeling is the only thing wrong with the planet is there’s people on it. If not for us, all the other animals, even dodo birds, would be here.” Steven Buchanan of California, a 66-year-old male Vietnam war veteran, began identifying as a woman named Susan Monica following an honorable discharge from the Navy. He enjoyed a successful engineering career before 1991, when he retired to a 20-acre rural property he purchased in Wimer, Oregon, where he raised pigs and chickens. Years later, Mr Monica hired Stephen Frank Delicino to work on the property as a handyman. In return for his work, Mr Delicino was financially compensated and allowed to reside on the land. In 2012, Mr Monica shot Mr Delicino to death and fed the corpse to his pigs. Mr Monica later hired Robert Haney as a handyman. Mr Haney was shot dead in 2013 and fed to the pigs. The crimes came to light after Mr Haney’s children grew concerned after not hearing from their father for some time and went to check on him. Mr Monica told police investigating the disappearance that Mr Haney had quit and left. The story unraveled when an investigation turned up security footage of Mr Monica using Mr Haney’s Oregon Trail Electronics Benefit Transfer card at a local Walmart the day after Mr Monica claimed to have last seen Mr Haney. Investigators found the remains of Mr Delicino in plastic bags on the property. According to testimony from State Police forensic anthropologist Veronica Vance, Mr Haney had suffered three to four gunshot wounds to the head. His legs had been chopped off with an ax, though it was unclear whether the mutilation took place before or after Mr Haney’s death. The thigh bones had been gnawed on by an animal.

Mr Monica told the police various stories in taped confessions, none of which aligned with the forensic evidence. In some instances, he claimed Mr Delicino had shot himself repeatedly in the head. At other times, he claimed to have shot Mr Delicino in self-defense, and that some of the corpse was eaten by pigs before Mr Monica could gather the remains. He claimed Mr Haney had disappeared for a month, and he had shot Mr Haney as a mercy killing after discovering him being disemboweled by the pigs.