The Dry Garden: Turning a monument to the past into a model for the future
Richard Schulhof, new CEO of the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. Schulhof, a native Angeleno, arrived from Harvard's Arnold Arboretum six months ago. “I didn’t come back here because I needed a job,” he said. “I came because I think L.A. should have a great arboretum.” Photo: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles was sold to the world as the place where anything grew. As if to prove it, more than 10,000 exotic plants were tested last century on the grounds of the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden in Arcadia. “The original notion was that it would be a big, big trial ground to see what could flourish in L.A.,” explained Richard Schulhof.
According to the Arboretum’s recently appointed chief executive officer, this makes the arboretum’s collection a living history. So many of the plants tested flourished that roughly half a century later, eucalyptus, …
Hedging its bet
Roman coin thought to have inspired a disgruntled Getty House gardener to adopt the name Mutunus Tutunus and begin carving obscene gestures and messages into local hedges.
Topiarist Mutunus Tutunus will be creating likenesses of shortlisted candidates for the general managership of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Friday night at the G2 Gallery in Venice. Outgoing temporary general manager David S. Freeman will also be honored in a work called “Hat.”
Typical of Tutunus, he refused to supply advance images. “Koons will just steal them,” he wrote to a gallery organizer. If Tutunus shows up, it will be a first. The former mayoral mansion groundsman turned artist is best known for pruning obscene forms into the hedges of Windsor Square residents after they mounted a letter-writing campaign to the mayor berating Tutunus for describing the neighborhood in a local gardening newsletter as Hancock Park, a far …
“Habitat as fuel”
The phrase is James Deacon’s. The University of Nevada biologist used the equation during a 2007 interview to describe the relationship between Las Vegas and the desert ecosystems of the Mojave and Great Basin. It’s borrowed here because Deacon’s observation applies equally well to the impact of cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix on the Colorado River, lakes of the Eastern Sierra and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
On the face of it, the average city dweller in Los Angeles seems fine with water being drawn from wild places to create an emerald island of lawn and ficus trees. It’s almost certainly a case of ignorance as bliss. At a wild guess, one in 500,000 Angelenos may be aware that our major water wholesaler is suing the federal Interior and Commerce departments, with our money and in our name no less, in order to upend Endangered Species …
The fish did it
A vote by the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California today all but assures that last year’s water delivery cuts of roughly 20% will continue through 2010. This was expected. One passable rain year does not a recovery make. The weird part of Met’s announcement is the belligerence, which puts responsibility for the “historic” prospect of continued rationing and price hikes on fish.
Roughly a third of Southern California’s water supply comes from the Northern California delta where the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers meet near San Francisco. The once fecund rivers have been losing their salmon, trout and smelt as the winter snowmelt that feed their waters is diverted south.
As Met’s general manager Jeffrey Kightlinger has it in today’s announcement, “The historic pumping restrictions in the Delta because of endangered fish species are compromising the statewide water system’s ability to capture adequate supplies.”
Disregarding …
Why I hate the Pulitzers
The most obvious reason is that I don’t have one. But, beyond that, as the names of the winners came down the wires this afternoon, the most deserving writer for beat journalism, or explanatory writing, or public service (take your pick) was not among them. He is Mike Taugher of the Contra Costa Times. I don’t know Taugher, but I could pick out a story by him without the byline. He is the reporter who is invariably at the edge of what can be known about water in northern California. His series on the two richest, most wildly entitled fixers in the state’s water politics opened the door to subsequent profiles of Lynda and Stewart Resnick by the New York Times and, only this weekend, the Associated Press. But Taugher was there first, with a shovel doing the hardest digging. The upshot? Among other things, without Taugher’s reporting in 2009, …
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