The dry garden: “Spontaneous urban vegetation”

Weeds do so much cooling, aerating and stabilizing of vacant lots and roadsides that Harvard horticulturist Peter Del Tredici has taken to celebrating them as “spontaneous urban vegetation.”

But when a mother lode of seed from these fast-breeding, water-hungry plants germinates in a garden, particularly a drought-tolerant garden in Southern California, it’s war. It’s a water war.

By weeding after winter rains, you can allocate water to the right plants and cut off the thirsty interlopers. You’ll snare the seeds of weeds before they can spread. You’ll also clear out a sweaty little under-zone of greedy greens that block air and light from the plants that you want to thrive.

Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times. Or click here to read about Tredici’s intriguing new book “Wild urban plants of the northeast,” keeping in mind that, thanks to us, many of those plants now exist in the west.…

The Dry Garden: Protecting the Pacific

What, you might ask, does the ocean have to do with gardening? In California, Orange County landscape designer Douglas Kent would reply: Everything. All the rain that we don’t catch during the winter and all of the irrigation spilled into the streets from our sprinklers in the warm months end up as storm water. “Water running into the ocean is not inherently harmful,” Kent writes in his new book Ocean Friendly Gardens. “It is the stuff attached to it and the stuff it picks up on the way to the ocean that is. Fertilizers, pesticides, oils, cleaning solutions and organic debris all run off a landscape.”

Click here to keep reading about Kent’s new book published by the Surfrider Foundation in the “The Dry Garden” column of the Los Angeles Times

The Dry Garden: Landmark book for California

Until now, there was always one sure way to tell whether or not you had hired the right landscape designer or architect for a job in California. The right one had a copy of Bob Perry’s 1992 book “Landscape Plants for Western Regions,” which was used so often that it occupied the passenger seat of his or her truck. That criterion changed this week. After eighteen years, Perry has finally produced a successor volume: “Landscape Plants for California Gardens.” For those of you worried about how to comply with the water budgets prescribed in last year’s Assembly Bill 1881, Perry gives the evapotranspiration rates not just for thousands of plants, but also correlates them for every California climate zone. He looks at water efficiency of irrigation systems. And, the reason landscapers loved him, after grouping plants by palette, he conclusively links those palette groups back to their water budgets.

“Landscape…

The Dry Garden: Meet the natives

It’s only February, but bestirred by rain and gathering days, California lilacs are blooming, manzanitas are bedecked with bells and irises are pent up for a March explosion. It doesn’t just feel like spring, it is spring in Southern California. So, if you are considering a dry garden for your home, now is the time to meet the natives. This is the moment to go to Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont. Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.

For listings of courses, hikes, plant sales and projects for Southern Californian dry gardeners, click here for a February calendar, and here for a March one.


The Dry Garden: Grand illusion

In his 1982 autobiography “My Last Breath,” film director Luis Buñuel wrote:

A year can go by, even two, without so much as a single cloud in the impassive sky. Whenever an adventuresome cumulus wandered into view just above the mountain peaks, all the clerks in the grocery next door would rush to our house and clamber up onto the roof. There, from the vantage point of a small gable, they’d spend hours watching the creeping cloud, shaking their heads and murmuring sadly: “Wind’s from the south. It’ll never get here.”

And they were always right.

May a Los Angeles filmmaker one day match the elegance with which the Spanish-born Buñuel exaggerated the dryness of his native Aragon. Annual rainfall there is much like ours: 12 to 15 inches a year.

But when it comes to exaggeration here, our tendency is to overstate the rain. Ever notice how much it rains in Los Angeles…

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