Welcome to the Natural Coalescence Blog

I will never forget being puzzled by a large tree, trying to ID it during a plant monitoring project but the leaves were all too high up and young to distinguish. So I climbed it. That’s when I had the “oh duh!” moment. Looking closer at a small branch, the large paired thorns below leaves of many pinnate leaflets were a total give away- that’s a black locust tree! Quite pretty actually, but still not a tree I especially like. Dang, not what we wanted to find. botanist,

Junipers are not the trees you think of associated with the drizzly Pacific Northwest. But they are old friends from home in the much drier south, much to the dismay of many pollen allergy sufferers there. The male trees can be so prolific it looks like smoke in the air. For this and other misinformed reasons, there is a trend of hating these trees, which are in fact native to this area across the south though they are spreading in an unhistorical way. To my endless annoy