Red Barns

Another picture I have taken and published many times, but I'm doing it again because I like the red and green Christmas colors. The hills are turning green as they do every winter...a welcome change from the parched dry grass of summer. 

The smaller red barn can be seen from Dana's house. I remember first noticing it when we saw it from the windows of what were to become Will and Peter's bedrooms when Dana and Jim had just signed the papers to buy it almost twenty years ago. They still live in the same house and can still see the red barn although a lot of new houses have been built around them since then.

The curving track on the hill behind the small barn was made by bulldozers during the fire last year either as a firebreak or as an access road through the nearly inaccessible terrain behind it. It is the sort of terrain which makes a lot of these woodland fires so difficult to fight and the reason why building new housing should probably be discouraged. 

In contrast to the more normal conifers on the hills the eucalyptus grove on the left isn't native and was probably planted as a windbreak. In Berkeley, so the story goes, they were planted by a lumber baron all across the East Bay Hills as timber. When they turned out to be unsuitable as timber, they were left to take over the rolling hills studded with native bay laurels. During the 1992 firestorm which burned 3,000 houses in those hills, the eucalyptus trees provided 80% of the fuel for the flames, and the city of Berkeley has been working not terribly successfully to eradicate them ever since. They are almost impossible to kill and there is a lot of controversy surrounding the effort.

There is another Berkeley story about palm trees like the one on the right, which aren't native either. My friend used to lead architectural tours of Berkeley and said that the reason there are so many palm trees in the small front gardens in Berkeley is that newly arrived families planted them so that they could have their pictures taken under them to send back to their friends and relatives in colder, harsher climates as proof of our 
'tropical' climate. I might add that it is both cold and dreich here today ...not at all tropical. 

I spent most of the day dusted with flour as I constructed and baked the walls of my gingerbread houses. Now they remain only to be glued together with hot caramelized sugar. Not my favorite part of the operation, but I've had lots of practice and burn myself less....