The Dry Garden: Carol’s list
AT A packed hall of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden last week, horticulturist Carol Bornstein was asked by assembled Southern Californian park keepers how native plants would do in landscapes irrigated by reclaimed water.
To read what the author of “California Native Plants for the Garden” advised in this week’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times, click here.
For information on how to attend Bornstein’s presentation on the sensory impact of native plants this Thursday night (October 8th) at the Southern California Horticultural Society meeting, click here and here for her October 15th talk on the same subject at the Solvang public library.…
The Dry Garden: Autumn leaves
WHILE the urban forests of Southern California lack the autumnal glory of Eastern woodlands, fall happens here. We do have trees that shed. Moreover, the annual drop of their canopies by hackberries, sycamores and pecans (to name only a few) is still a bonanza. From these leaves, and just about any leaf that flutters to the ground, comes leaf mold.
To keep reading this week’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times, click here. Photo: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times
UPDATE: To go on cyber-hikes finding fall with California Native Plant Society tour guide Jane Strong, click here. Or to sign up for an actual hike with the San Gabriel Mountains chapter of the CNPS, click here.…
The Dry Garden: A visit with Susan Gottlieb
Buckwheat in the garden of Susan Gottlieb. Photo: Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times. All rights reserved. Click on the florets to be taken to the Los Angeles Times Dry Garden column
They say that beauty comes from within, but in the case of Susan Gottlieb, it seems to come from the world around her. She is, at 67, not pretty, not handsome, but storybook beautiful. The former nurse has such an Alice in Wonderland-like grace and lightness that as she hops around her 1-acre garden in Beverly Hills, enchantment sets in.
Is she quite human?
Her husband, lawyer Daniel Gottlieb, chuckles thinking back to when he first showed his bride-to-be the house in the late 1980s. “She looked at the back said, ‘It’s all covered with ivy. There’s nothing for the birds.’ I said, ‘Can’t the birds make do with ivy?’ ”’
By 1990, the ivy was on its way out …
Water in Venice
A Western Grebe in Mendocino County, California. This photograph by Ron LeValley is part of “H2O,” an exhibit on water by four photographers at the G2 Gallery in Venice. The other contributors are Michele Westmorland, Eric Chen and Elizabeth Carmel. For information on the exhibit, which runs until September 20, and other water-related events sponsored by the gallery, click here.…
The Dry Garden: The Frenchman’s guide to (not) watering
COFFEE table books on gardening are generally so useless that it has been tempting to ask publishers to send review copies straight to the dump. Yet when Joan DeFato, retired librarian of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden, came to lunch bearing a big specimen that was not so much glossy as positively lacquered, I sat down and read it. Disbelief mounted with every turn of the page of the Thames & Hudson offering, “The Dry Gardening Handbook: Plants and Practices for a Changing Climate.”
This was a beauty queen with brains.
The author is nurseryman Olivier Filippi. A Frenchman, Filippi betrays an understandable fondness for the dry plants of his native garrigue, the French version of our chaparral. His writing is most poetic when touching on the “thick and sticky smell” of rockroses and the like. Yet as he pushes out beyond the south of France …
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