The Dry Garden: Speak now or forever hold your peace
Sprinkler run-off streams down Baldwin Avenue from Los Angeles County Arboretum street plantings past the county's public works office until it is plated into a sewer system that takes it to the Pacific Ocean. This is water from a reserve that is largely imported from the Colorado River and San Francisco Bay tributaries, pumped to Southern California at huge cost to the environment, treated to potability at great expense to us, then sprayed on inappropriate hedges with inappropriate irrigation equipment so that it is quickly turned into a ribbon of polluted urban slobber. And it is the County of Los Angeles doing it in a place where residents are supposed to learn the best garden practices.
Since arriving at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden more than a year and a half ago, Chief Executive Richard Schulhof has been listening.
The region’s leading horticultural figures have been invited …
Trademark this
LA Observed is the latest to pick up on a spat between a Pasadena family seeking to trademark the term “urban homestead” and the rest of the kitchen gardening world. According to Santa Monica organizers, said family even sent a cease and desist letter to the Santa Monica Public Library/Farmers Market over using the term for a panel discussion last week. There’s now a Facebook page dedicated to shaming the family. Readers, note well: It’s not just wordplay at stake. You may wake up to find your own name trademarked. A designer of spill proof placemats had the temerity to trademark my name some years ago. Given her emphasis on childish appurtenances, it’s a safe guess that I was publicly and commercially using the name long before some toddler knocked over a cup in her presence. Yet taking a patent on a byline never occurred to me. My niece is …
Meet ‘Dekopon’
“I still remember the first time I tasted the legendary fruit the Dekopon. Think of a huge mandarin, easy to peel and seedless, with firm flesh that melts in the mouth, an intense sweetness balanced by refreshing acidity, and a complex, lingering mandarin orange aroma. I’ve tasted more than 1,000 varieties of citrus, and to me the Dekopon is the most delicious,” writes UC Riverside pomologist David Karp in today’s Los Angeles Times.
I have no way of knowing what else Karp has tasted in his many years traveling the country visiting orchards and writing about fruit for his weekly column in the Los Angeles Times and former columns in the New York Times and Gourmet, but I do know that the Dekopon is extraordinary, like a perfect sorbet, except made by a tree instead of a chef. David, pictured above holding a Dekopon, happened to be visiting a …
‘Fracking’ update
USGS map of the Monterey Shale formation doctored by an energy website "OilShaleGas.com." Click on the map to see if you live in "an area of mutual interest."
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks to do with “fracking” or the mining technique more properly called hydraulic fracturing. The Los Angeles Times reports that the oil and gas industry has written the Academy of Motion Pictures attacking the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland” as riddled with inaccuracies. T. Boone Pickens appeared on the Daily Show claiming, “I have fracked 3,000 wells in my life” and that “they always say that it contaminates the aquifer. I’ve never seen that happen.” Meanwhile, though the gas industry agreed to discontinue the use of diesel in fracking fluids in 2004, a congressional investigation reported late last month that more than 32 million gallons of it was used anyway. AP reports that fracking is a …
The Dry Garden: Best dressed list
If the view from your front window is a hedge so maimed by years of buzzing that the only option is to buzz it some more, and if you have better things to do with your money than pay yard crews to torture shrubbery, it may be time to dig out that green wall and start over.
But before sharpening the pickax, dream. Dream aloud. There is no better time than February to view California’s native lilac, lemonade berry, coffeeberry, gooseberry and barberry plants, most of which are in full flower at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden.
A tour of Southern California’s best native garden in midwinter reveals these shrubs dripping with gold, white, pink and blue flowers. Although the blossoms are admittedly fleeting accessories, they are succeeded by berries.
Apologies for language that sounds like red carpet commentary. It’s unfair to the plants. Click here to keep reading …
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