If the countryside is not green it is dying

If the countryside is not green it is dying
Originally uploaded by botanize

I knew that California has a Mediterranean climate. I know that means cool wet winters and warm dry summers. I know how important that may be for the evolution of grains. But I didn't really know what that means.

"But Adam, looking out over his dry dust-obscured land, felt the panic the Eastern man always does at first in California. In a Connecticut summer two weeks without rain is a dry spell and four a drought. If the countryside is not green it is dying. But in California it does not ordinarily rain at all between the end of May and the first of November. The Eastern man, though he has been told, feels the Earth is sick in the rainless months."

- John Steinbeck - East of Eden