Going native

1998: Garden that came with the house

2002: Interim garden with box hedge and lavender around oak saplings

2008: Garden in transition to strongly native with no built-in irrigation and only occasional hose watering. Plants in image: live oaks, irises, lavender, coyote bush, native honeysuckle, ceanothus, poppies and one very hardy tea rose. Paving part of a zero runoff water-capturing design adapted in Los Angeles to City of Santa Monica standards.

Emily Green, publisher of this website and writer of the “Dry Garden” column for the Los Angeles Times, will be speaking on December 8th at the California Native Plant Society on “A Decade of killing plants and learning from the survivors.” Snapshots, left, are examples from the period, from 1998 to 2008, during which Green began chronicling for the Times the transition from conventional to native gardening.

For information, click here.…

Solar pilot, without impact report, proposed for Owens Valley

Nearly a century after Los Angeles drained Owens Lake by diverting its water to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the city now hopes to generate solar energy on the dusty salt flats it left behind, reports Phil Wilson in the Los Angeles Times.

The Department of Water and Power’s board of commissioners Tuesday unanimously approved a renewable energy pilot project that would cover 616 acres of lake bed with solar arrays — a possible precursor to a mammoth solar farm that could cover thousands of acres.

To keep reading, click here.…

Gag me with a high rise

Las Vegas City Center. Photo: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times. Click on the image to be taken to the story.

AS the US heads to Copenhagen without any clear plan to combat the effects of climate change on water, one of the areas predicted to be worst hit by global warming, Las Vegas, Nevada, is opening “CityCenter.”

In a preview so unctuous that it would embarrass an ad agency, the Los Angeles Times travel section writes, “Even in Las Vegas, a town not given to architectural subtleties, CityCenter looms large. The 67-acre, $8.5-billion, 18-million-square-foot ‘city within a city’ combines size and flourish with environmental consciousness.”

What?…

High good, low bad: Mead in November

For the moment, the future of Lake Mead is a coin toss, writes Henry Brean in the Las Vegas Review Journal. By this time next year, the surface of the reservoir could rise by about 15 feet or drop to a level not seen since 1937, when the lake was being filled for the first time. To keep reading Brean’s November 27, 2009 article, click here. After the jump are the federal Bureau of Reclamation closing elevations for Lake Mead for the month of November along with contrasting closing November levels going back to 2004.
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    Emily Green by e-mail at emily.green [at] mac.com

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