East Bay Home and Gardens

Historic Holiday Houses On View Around East Bay

By Steven Finacom
Friday December 07, 2007
Stately older houses can be at their best when festively decorated for the winter holidays. -more-

More Gift Ideas for Your Favorite Gardener

By Ron Sullivan
Friday December 07, 2007
You don’t need an official occasion, you know. If you know a gardener, go ahead and give her a gift just ‘cuz. Call it an Unbirthday Present; I do a certain amount of that with my rellies because after 58 years of living in it I still don’t track time very well. -more-

Our Mushy Landscape, Part Two

By Matt Cantor
Friday December 07, 2007
I was out with a young contractor at the home of a client he wanted me to talk with the other day. The homeowner had a wet basement and garage that never seemed to dry out. We walked around and I looked up the hill to find a line of extraordinarily healthy and prolific trees and shrubs marching to the crest of the hill. They ran in a line from north to south, roughly. “Creek”, I cried, “Well, maybe an aquifer.” -more-

Wild Neighbors: Junco Testosterone and Water Snake Bites

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday December 04, 2007
A couple of odds and ends: Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neurobiologist, published a collection of his provocative essays a few years back as The Trouble with Testosterone. Where do you begin? Sapolsky was mostly interested in the hormone’s effect on the behavior of East African savannah baboons (see his A Primate’s Memoirs for tales of fieldwork) and on humans. But it’s not just a primate thing, or even a mammalian one. Birds have testosterone too, as do reptiles, amphibians, even fish: a common vertebrate heritage. -more-