The Dry Garden: Raven at Rancho
Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, at dusk in a meadow of irises, poppies and sage at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, California, where he was honored for his work on biodiversity last Sunday. “It makes sense that we’ll come to a point where we’re sustainable,” he told the audience. “The question we must ask ourselves now is how long it will take and what we will lose in the process?" Photo: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times.
As the program had it, the ceremony at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont was to honor Peter Raven. But those who came away from Sunday’s event might be forgiven for believing that Raven, the man Time magazine called a “hero for the planet,” had come to honor Rancho Santa Ana.
For those unfamiliar with Raven, he is to plants what David Attenborough is to animals. He …
The Dry Garden: Hummers and snapdragons
Channel Islands native Galvezia speciosa amounts to a year-round hummingbird feeder on a negligible water budget. Cal Poly Pomona landscape architect Bob Perry recommends the hybrid 'Firecracker' (above) as being compact and therefore suitable to many gardens. Photo: Bob Perry / Land Design Publishing
If you are considering a hummingbird feeder, try buying a plant instead of a bottle.
For what seems like a year-round fountain of nectar, make that plant a bush snapdragon. Galvezia speciosa, as this Channel Island native is more properly known, flowers four out of four seasons and 365 days a year. Its bright red tubular blossoms clearly evolved with hummingbirds as pollinators, and the birds will stake out your garden the instant the plant goes in the ground.
They are very hard to kill; Galvezia’s only weakness is susceptibility to freezing. Other than that, they can be used throughout most of Southern California. The …
The Dry Garden: A novel place
Read the novel “Blame” and it comes as no surprise that author Michelle Huneven gardens, or that she is Southern Californian. There is no inventing the familiarity in the descriptions of buckwheat “drying to a dark iron red,” the hurl-me weight after a rain of a clump of freshly pulled long grass, or how wildfire embers fly “like fat, radiant insects.”
The surprise comes on seeing her foothill garden for the first time, and realizing that such an overwhelmingly sensuous world is so accessible — that we all could all fill the land around our homes with scents, textures, flowers, fruit and vegetables if only we gave up lawn. Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden interview with Michelle Huneven in the Los Angeles Times.
And click here for information about this Sunday’s Mar Vista tour of 80 gardens that have all forsaken turf for food and …
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, …
The Dry Garden: Eco-snooping, part three
You might set out on the Theodore Payne Foundation tour this weekend for righteous reasons — to save water, or to help birds and butterflies. But the sheer beauty of Wynne Wilson’s Altadena home will have you wondering, why doesn’t everyone garden with natives? Her partnering of indigenous coral bells and lilac with the Mediterranean staples of citrus and lavender is so stupidly beautiful that you want to cry.
Click here for part three in the Los Angeles Times of The Dry Garden’s preview of this weekend’s Theodore Payne Foundation tour.…
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