The Dry Garden: UCLA in theory and in practice
Stephanie Landregan, program director of the UCLA Extension Landscape Architecture & Horticulture program. Click on the image to find out about certificate courses. Photo: Emily Green
Nobody ever said that doing the right thing was easy. Students in UCLA Extension’s landscape architecture and horticulture program now learn this before leaving with a certificate. “All of our advanced design classes used to be make-believe,” said Stephanie Landregan, appointed program director two years ago. “Now every one of our advanced classes is involved with the community. Every one of our students has real projects and reality checks. The big ideas get tested.”
Just such a test happened in November, when an undergraduate from UCLA’s environmental science department contacted Landregan wanting to know how his class might introduce a water-efficient landscape somewhere on the 400-plus-acre campus. Landregan partnered his class with a group of her graduate extension students, and the team soon …
La Niña watch begins
After 16.36* inches of rain recorded for downtown Los Angeles from June 2009-June 2010, ocean conditions indicate a transition from the mildly wet El Niño system that gave Southern California a slightly better than average rainfall year to a dry La Niña one, according to the National Weather Service. An experimental and unofficial outlook map set issued by its Climate Prediction Center lays out a hot and dry 2010/11. Jet Propulsion Laboratory oceanographer Bill Patzert is already betting on a dry La Niña 2010/11 season. “Two years of El Niño are just such a low probability,” he said. “Six out of ten years are dry. I wish I had those odds in Vegas.” For those who think in terms of “normal” rainfall for Los Angeles, he added, “Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.”
*From the NWS California Nevada Forecast Center. NWS Los Angeles / Oxnard records …
By popular demand
Marianne Simon of the Santa Monica firm Poetic Plantings was noted for her design's permeable paving, screening, recycled materials and use of Mediterranean, California native and edible plants.
After more than 4,000 votes were cast by the public, the City of Santa Monica has announced the winning designs for its three sustainable demonstration gardens to be installed this fall off Airport Boulevard. Click here to read about the winners in the Los Angeles Times.…
Water and power(point)
The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power yesterday released a sketch operating budget for 2010/11, which the Los Angeles Times reports may spell rate hikes from 4% to 8% for consumers. For those interested in the source of their water and power, the budget offers some nice graphics (lifted left; click to enlarge). As a couple of asides, the cost of converting from coal to renewable sources of energy inspired the recent rebellion in the Los Angeles City Council; and consistent clean hydropower from Hoover Dam is dependent on adequate elevations in Lake Mead, a source threatened by inadequate conservation programs by the department and its umbrella agency, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
Click here to be taken to the proposed LADWP budget, or here for yesterday’s report card for the department, which in the face of incompetent leadership by the Mayor of Los Angeles and turbulent …
High good, low bad: Mead in May 2010
Two graphics from the 2007/2008 Annual Report of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (the most recent available) illustrate how water exports from the San Joaquin and Sacramento River Bay Delta (right) rose sharply as surpluses dried up on the Colorado River (left) after 2002. Click on the image to enlarge the graphics.
Eleven years into a dramatic drought* on the Colorado River, in 2009, the City of Los Angeles finally saw fit to issue a lawn watering ordinance that reduced sprinkler irrigation to a twice weekly schedule. It was an overdue and obvious step given that roughly half of Southern California’s water supply is used out of doors, and half of that is estimated to be wasted through sprinkler run-off and pavement hosing.
That ordinance, which took effect a year ago today, reduced the city’s water consumption to 1991 levels even though the law was widely flouted, …
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