Christmas in April
Homeowners unite for water conservation and environmental quality. This garden on Redwood Avenue in Los Angeles is one of the 80 on the Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase tour this Sunday, April 25, from 2-6pm. Admission Free. Click on the image for more information.
Poppies and artichokes at a Redwood Avenue garden in Los Angeles, part of Sunday's Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase. "What says California better?" asks homeowner-designer Marilee Kuhlmann. Photo: Leigh Curran. Click on the image for a map to the Kuhlmann-Curran garden.
Regular readers of this site know its aversion to chronological gimmicks. Water Day. Ride Your Bike to Work Day. Ignore the Days Day. But this Earth Day event is so damn impressive, so much more than an empty hoorah by self-styled goodniks, that it amounts to Christmas in April. Every year residents of Mar Vista invite the public into their gardens to help anyone who …
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 …
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 …
Do I hear three dollars?
Las Vegas topped the regional cash-for-grass payout rate with $2 per square foot (now down to $1.50) until the City of Long Beach today announced that it will be offering $2.50 per square foot up to $2,500 for qualifying homeowners.
The calculus behind this sort of bribery is that it is cheaper for a Western water authority to pay homeowners to remove turf and replace it with a drought tolerant garden rather than for the city to vie with competitors for ever more water from an ever shrinking common pool.
Beyond the decision to increase the bounty on turf, what sets Long Beach’s program apart from, say, the cash-for-grass scheme launched by the City of Los Angeles last June is an enviable combination of conviction and competence.
While the City of Los Angeles sat on its …
By God, we’re green
THE League of Conservation Voters today issued its Environmental Score Card for 2009. The good news: The 111th Congress is so far better than the 110th.
The bad? See for yourself, however drink before reading if you don’t believe that attempting the upend the Endangered Species Act, or running a pipeline to the foot of the Great Basin National Park entitles a politician to a perfect score.…
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