About The Umbel Journal

The Umbel Journal is an independent field journal about the wild buckwheats, the North American genus Eriogonum, and the dry gardens of the American West. It is written for dry-climate gardeners and rock gardeners, for hikers and native plant walkers who want names for the shrubs on sagebrush hillsides, and for newcomers to native plant societies who are looking for their first buckwheat. The journal sells nothing, belongs to no nursery and to no society.

What the journal covers

• The Field Guide section explains what a wild buckwheat is, how to identify one on a walk by its involucres, leaves and habitat, and portraits of the species gardeners and hikers meet first, from sulfur buckwheat to California buckwheat and Saint Catherine's lace.
• The Dry Gardens section covers cultivation from seed to shears: raising buckwheats from seed with honest germination expectations, planting a dry garden that survives its first summer, and the light pruning that keeps a garden shrub compact.
• The People and Pollinators section reads the living world around the genus: the bees, butterflies and hummingbirds that work the dry season heads, the Eriogonum Society described in the third person, and James L. Reveal, the botanist who mapped the genus.

How the articles are written

The Umbel Journal editorial team writes each article from public sources named in the text, including regional floras, native plant society pages and reference works on the genus. Every organisation, nursery or society mentioned is described in the third person. The journal states the limits of its own advice: a field guide page is not a botanical monograph, and a garden page cannot see a reader's slope, soil or drainage. Where a question needs a local answer, the articles say so.

A note on this domain

This domain carried the Eriogonum Society's website from 2009 until the society moved to new publishing arrangements around 2022; the society is active today at eriogonum.community. The Umbel Journal is not the society's journal and speaks neither for it nor against it: its pages describe the society, its seed exchange and its history from the outside, like any other subject. The old society addresses that carried real subject matter are redirected to the journal pages closest to those subjects, so a link planted years ago still lands somewhere useful.

Who the journal is for

Readers who will get the most from these pages garden in dry summer climates, walk in the western states and want to recognize what flowers at their feet, or grow rock garden plants and want one more genus that behaves. No page assumes Latin training: the botanical words that matter, involucre first among them, are explained where they appear. Readers can reach the editorial team from the contact page, and read the legal details of the site on the legal notice page.