Today is International Coffee Day. There is a legend that tells of coffee's discovery: In Ethiopia, there was a goatherder who observed his goats didn't want to go to sleep at night after eating berries from a certain tree. After he reported this to the Abbot of a local monastery, the Abbott gathered the berries himself and then made a drink with them. The Abbott's discovered the drink kept him awake and alert for the long hours of evening prayers. The rest is history. The coffee plant is actually a shrub. It's an evergreen that has a light gray bark and shiny, dark leaves that are five inches long. If the coffee plant wasn't pruned back, it could grow up to thirty feet tall in the wild. It takes the coffee plant five years to be able to produce fruit. Coffee plants have an interesting life cycle; they can live to be 100 years old, but their producing years are between the ages of 7 and 20. And, the next time you think about the equator, reframe it as "The Bean Belt." Coffee plants grow best along the equator.       Brevities #OTD Today is the anniversary of the death of the “Dean of Landscape Architects,” Jens Jensen, who died on this day in 1860. Jens Jensen was featured in The Living Green Documentary; he was an early pioneer in the conservation movement and used art as activism. He was ahead of his time. Jensen and Frank Lloyd Wright were contemporaries. Jensen made over 600 Landscapes and was known as the "Poet of the Prairie." The prairie was the theme of his work, and Jensen likened the prairie to the sea. He felt there was spiritualism that rose out of the long grass and that every person on earth needed the living green. He valued the natural lands, and he recognized that nature had restorative powers. Jensen was a maker of public parks and spaces. Later in life, Jensen moved his family into a remote part of Wisconsin called Ellison Bay, located in northern door county. Even in 2010, the population was just 165. It was Jens Jensen who said, "Where there is forest, there is peace." and “Trees are much like human beings and enjoy each other's company. Only a few love to be alone.”       #OTD Today is the birthday of California plant collector, LeRoy Abrams, who was born on this day in 1874. Abrams was born in Sheffield, Iowa. He moved west with his parents as a small boy. As a graduate student, Abrams performed yeoman's work botanizing the area around Los Angeles. A biographical sketch of Abrams said, "[Abrams] crisscrossed southern California in a wagon, on the back of a mule or burrow, and on foot to make field observations... and collect specimens from Santa Barbara to Yuma, from Needles to San Diego, and from the Salton Sink prior to its flooding to the summits of Old Baldy" In 1902, Abrams published a flora of Los Angeles and Vicinity. (The vicinity included a fifty-mile radius around LA). In 1909, Abrams married a fellow student at Stanford. Her name was Letitia Patterson; they shared everything together - especially the joys of their mountain cabin they had built with their own hands on the west side of Fallen Leaf Lake. When their only daughter died a few short years after her college graduation, they shouldered their grief together. Abrams served as the director of the Natural History Museum at Stanford, where he taught botany for thirty-four years. He did not live to see the completion of his dream, a four-volume work called An Illustrated Flora of the Pacific States (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1923–1960, 4 vols.). However, it was Abrams's dream to carry out; he had been inspired by the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) and their three-volume work, An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada, and the British Possessions, by Britton and Brown. Abrams was a loving teacher. His students called him "Father."       #OTD On this day in 1887, the botanists John and Harvey Ruth made a trip to Wyker's Island to collect fall flora. Wyker's Island is now known as Lynn Island, in the Delawar