One of my favorite magazines both to write for and about, GOOD, had a party last weekend here in NY. The theme was greenmarket gourmet! All the vendors were so cute and of course gave us many, many samples.

It was right on the East River and although it was oppressively moist, a nice breeze kicked up as the sun went down. To get there, I rode a bike over the Williamsburg Bridge for the first time.

Never before have I been so thrilled with the spread at a party. Sugar snap peas! Strawberries! Sausage! Heirlooms you could just pick up and eat like an apple! Honey lavender gin cocktails!

Come to think of it, I have been drinking a lot of gin this summer. Normally I would not touch the stuff. But there have been so many interesting drinks presented to me that include gin. I believe gin is in!

For the last 15 days an amazing technicolor stream of fluids has poured forth from every orifice on my head. After living here for six springs with nary a sneeze, suddenly Los Angeles, a place I believed I was immune to, has rendered me allergic.

After decorating my desk with festive Kleenex drifts for a week, I ventured out of the house for a walk up Outpost. Looking towards Runyon Canyon Park I suddenly realized the hills were not only green, but yellow and purple and blue (they’re usually brown, brown, brown) and remembered that thanks to the expert timing of a monsoon in January, this is a banner year for wildflowers. So I ran home, got my camera, and over the course of three expeditions to Runyon, documented exactly what was incapacitating me.

Now, nearing the end of my congestion, I present to you:  Project Runyon.

Some findings:

· These are only the plants that are currently blooming and this changes every day. I’ll try to add to them over the next few weeks, noting which are just starting to bloom into May.

· Using my Introduction to the Plant Life of Southern California, I think I’ve identified about 75% of them, so please let me know if you know something I don’t, or if I have something wrong, or send this to someone who might know such things.

· If I knew a flower was not native or invasive, I noted it beneath the photo. Plus since people lived/live in Runyon, there are plenty of flowers that have been planted around residences. I tried to note that, too.

· Also important: I am not a photographer, these are only reference photos. But I did use that little tulip icon on my camera.

· The most prevalent flower in Runyon—that fluorescent yellow bloom so bright you can see it from planes—is not native! Black mustard creeps over our hillsides, choking out our SoCal natives. Here’s a nice piece about the noxious plants and invasive weeds in the area, and what you can do about it.

·  I have tried for years to learn the names of the native plants in Los Angeles by reading books but this is the first time I actually remembered them! The process of identifying them in the park, sorting through the photos, and looking them up has truly burned them into my brain.

· I found plenty of what I’m allergic to—oak and grass—but it would be interesting to know why all of a sudden I’m reliving my childhood of hayfever. However, if you’re suffering this time of year, rest assured:  That which doesn’t kill you sure looks pretty.

I was thrilled to see this story by Janet Cromley in today’s LA Times, “StairMaster with a view: Hiking the stairways of Echo Park, Silver Lake.” Not just because finding and hiking the stairways in my neck of Hollywood has become my own personal obsession, but because the subject of the story, Dan Koeppel, took me on an abbreviated version of his 16.2 mile hike a few years ago.

Dan’s a freelance writer with outdoor inclinations (and, if I remember correctly, the calf muscles to match). But his step obsession began while writing the memoir To See Every Bird on Earth. The book is about his father, who basically left their family to become one of the pre-eminent birders in the world (he’s seen over 7,000 species). Dan needed something to help him escape his own head, so he started hiking and cataloging a route that started outside his front door. When Dan and I took our walk, he was working on Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (which came out last year) and peppered our hike with at least 50 fascinating banana anecdotes. I got the feeling Dan might need more than a simple stairway hike to download after he finished that book.

I still have a paper version of the map that Dan gave me, an eight-page document rainbow-coded to elevation gain (red=thigh burn), along with a spreadsheet that gives directions and tips (”Tricky, make sure you’re on Lucile!”). Now Dan’s put the map online so fellow stairmasters can join in the hike. When we parted ways almost three years ago I swore to create a route linking my stairs with his. The stairs are there—I’ve got a solid route from my neighborhood all the way west through Beachwood Canyon, and I’ve hiked some in Los Feliz Estates, throughout Franklin Hills, right down into to Silver Lake and Echo Park, and beyond into Eagle Rock—but I failed to keep up my end of the bargain. Maybe I need to write a book.

Everyone’s got Fritz Fever! You’ll remember we had Fritz Haeg on DnA last month, and since then a bunch of other pieces have popped up about the author of the new book Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. First there’s this video online at Dwell, where you can see Fritz’s style sense is as highly developed as his knack for landscape architecture. Nice scarf!

Then don’t forget to read this piece by Jade Chang in Metropolis, where once again Fritz is looking sharp in a v-neck undershirt and tasty Fedora. Jade also blogged about the “jam session” Fritz held at MOCA PDC last weekend with the guys from Fallen Fruit, where guests walked away with jam made from city-foraged loquats, grapefruits and oranges. Loving how these like-minded groups are collaborating more and more on fun events. It’s so very LA.

I’ve been waiting to write about outdoor apparel company Patagonia pretty much all my life. My parents packed me in the stuff for my first ski lesson, and ever since, I ‘ve managed to stay extremely faithful to their products. Even on a beer-burrito-bagel budget at college in Boulder where crunchy detractors were more than happy to point out my preference for “Patagucci.”

So when I finally got the choice assignment from Fast Company, you could say I was a little worried about my ability to remain objective. Heck, when I went up to meet with their sustainability team in Ventura, I was wearing a Patagonia shell and carrying a Patagonia backpack. It was like wearing the band’s shirt to the concert.

Patagonia launched the Footprint Chronicles quietly last year, short web videos that track the impact of five of their products. You get introduced to the woman who’s making your polo shirt in at a factory Thailand, and peer into the eyes of the Merino sheep who’ll be sheared for your crew in New Zealand. These videos are just the latest of these epic journeys that Patagonia loves to package for their fans. And the audience loves it. After all, this is a company that provides a guide to climbing schools on their website, a series of online essays detailing a grizzly bear’s migration through Montana, and a multimedia saga of surfer-filmmaker-brothers The Malloys driving a biodiesel truck from Bend, Oregon to the tip of Baja.

The key phrase for the Footprint Chronicles, as with all corporate greening practices lately, is transparency, and Patagonia vowed to show all of their findings, the good and the bad. But there seemed to be very little bad afoot at Patagonia. Employees Jill Dumain and Jen Rapp enthusiastically took me on a tour of an organic cotton factory where we all snapped as many photos as we wanted of the sunny, spotless warehouse blasting rock music. They hosted me for a day in Patagonia’s Ventura headquarters, a series of refurbished buildings where the bathrooms show you where to toss your paper towels for composting, free on-site day care lets employees hang with their kids during breaks, and the kitchen serves homemade, mostly-organic meals like fish tacos and cabbage slaw. If you want me to be objective, you should definitely not serve me homemade, mostly-organic meals like fish tacos and cabbage slaw. With this really awesome spicy mayo.

But after extensive mayo-free research, I decided that Patagonia is probably walking the walk better than any other company out there. Their colleagues I interviewed in the industry agreed.

I guess I’d always known Patagonia was a leader for environmental issues but I don’t buy their products for those reasons. I buy them because I don’t have to buy very many of them at all. My favorite pair of Patagonia long underwear pants—the very first thing I grab when I’m going skiing—are from 1996. And they still work great.