You are now in San Diego County category.

In January of this year, James Watson, an Australian scientist who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society, noticed an image that had been tweeted by a friend of his, a physician in Sydney. With a chain of progressively larger circles, it illustrated the relative frequency of causes of death among Australians, from the vanishingly rare (war, pregnancy and birth, murder) to the extremely common (respiratory disorders, cancer, heart disease). It was a simple but striking depiction of comparative risk. “I thought, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done something like this for the rest of nature?’ ”Watson recalled.

In 1933, a number of scattered newspaper articles appeared across Southern California extolling the grandeur and beauty of some recently discovered massive limestone caves within the Mojave’s Providence Mountains near the old Bonanza King Mine. Known today as Mitchell Caverns, these geological wonders were named after Jesse E. “Jack” Mitchell who had initially explored the caves in 1929 and would later market them into a popular recreational destination accessible from the National Trails Highway, better known as Route 66.

Dear Garden Coach: I am a new gardener who replaced a lawn with Mediterranean and native plants and have noticed some of the plants, such as a native purple sage and monkey flower, are losing their leaves. They are not dead. I see smaller leaves appearing. Do I need to water the plants more often?