Blog Crawl Gems

Recent Treasures: trees, trees, and more trees, including some in rocks; neat geo/adventure blog; and Earth Day history.

I have only a small collection of blog gems to share today, but they are gems.  I discovered several blogs of interest at Treeblogging.com, "a forest of arboreal links”. Tree A. Ware ... mad about trees posted some truly spectacular photos of amazing color and beauty featuring the rainbow eucalyptus.  Rainbow-hued tree bark below courtesy carvalho by way of flickr.

Loose and Leafy put together a wonderful post about urban gardens: the tough little plants that make it amidst concrete and metal and speed-bump cobbles in urban landscapes.

Dandelion to left courtesy martijndevalk.nl by way of flickr.

For plants in rocks, check out the cool fossil scale trees courtesy Wooster Geologists.  Right:  reconstruction of the scale tree Lepidodendron by Dutch conservationist Eli Heimans (1911).

I was happy to find the geology/adventure/photo blog, Cedar & Sand, while searching for information on the San Rafael Reef -- terrific photos and nice stories, too.

Map of the 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, the original impetus for Earth Day;
from the American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

A friend and I got to reminiscing about our experiences on the first Earth Day back in 1970, prompting me to refresh my memory re its history.  I came across this very interesting website/archive devoted to Gaylord Nelson (left), Earth Day, and “the making of the modern environmental movement”.

The making of the modern environmental movement:  Santa Maria High School Ecology Club, 1970.