The Dry Garden: Joy to the Valley
When the Valley Performing Arts Center opens to the public in February, it will be down to others to convey the thrill of seeing such a remarkable new venue rise from the Campus of Cal State Northridge. Admiration here is reserved for the landscape architect who encircled the center with 173 native trees, then punctuated the courtyard with a Dr Seuss-worthy assembly of succulents while achieving a tenfold reduction in the site’s previous water use.
That landscape architect is Stephen Billings of the Santa Monica firm Pamela Burton & Co.
Click here to keep reading in the Los Angeles Times about the new garden at the Valley Performing Arts Center.…
The Dry Garden: color me Western
It takes a hard heart not to swoon when the liquidambars that line so many streets in greater Los Angeles conduct their flaming descent into dormancy. As if entire city blocks drawn together in a season finale weren’t an eloquent enough elegy for a calendar year, the scarlet confetti of crape myrtle trees and the golden last gasp of ginkgos join the orchestra in a way that makes November and December the Southern Californian equivalent of fall back East.
There is, of course, a “but” coming, and it’s a big one. We’re not back East. Although the yearly curtain call of these exotic trees is undeniably glorious, they have a timing problem. It’s barely fall. Winter solstice is just four days away. How bothered you are by this lag depends on how you feel about leaf blowers working on Christmas Day.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in …
The Dry Garden: Season’s gleanings
We can’t all be Virginia Paca, the gardener profiled on this blog in October who grows food and donates it to food banks. But this winter those of us with orange trees laden with fruit might take a page from the book of that Pasadenan. What more fitting holiday activity could there be than to glean our home orchards and donate fresh fruit to local pantries?
As winter closes in, that fruit very well may be oranges. It is pure serendipity that an activity that feeds people is also good for the orange trees.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.…
The Dry Garden: Lawn killer’s tip sheet
Most of us know that the environmental toll of ornamental lawn in Southern California makes cigarettes look politically correct. Still, removing a long-tended home lawn takes a meeting of conviction and know-how. The steely inspiration will have to be yours. This column is intended only as a lawn killer’s tip sheet.
Click here to keep reading about graminicide in the Los Angeles Times.…
The Dry Garden: Multiplication by division
Pulling up a plant and ripping it in half at the roots is a violent way of showing affection, but for a school of groundcovers, including many grasses, bulbs and woodsy flowers, doing just that amounts to true love. So, if you have established giant rye, coral bells, irises or hummingbird sage, and you want more of the same, now is the moment to divide and separate the plants.
Short days and early showers are abetting this endeavor. If you can’t jump when the meteorologists say “rain,” do it when you have time, then give the transplants a steady, gentle watering.
How roughly or tenderly you handle division should depend on the plant. Click here to keep reading about how to divide native plants in The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.
*An earlier version of this post mistakenly labeled …
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