The Dry Garden: Fall planting season
Posted on | September 23, 2011 | No Comments
The question comes every spring as our state flower, Eschscholzia californica, blooms. “Is it too late to plant poppies?” The answer is no, it’s not too late. It’s perfectly late. Whether sowing wildflowers, or planting perennials and woody herbs and shrubs, or putting natives into the ground, the best time to plant here is in late fall or early winter. The idea is to do what the plants do naturally: Get seed in the ground in advance of the coming rainy season.
Click here to keep reading this week’s installment of The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times
Green season
Posted on | September 16, 2011 | 2 Comments
If you’ve ever wondered when to plant lettuce, watch for dandelions. Every spring and autumn, these urban wildflowers signal the start of temperate periods when the region has warmed up or cooled down to the point that it’s salad season.
Click here to keep reading this week’s dry garden column in the Los Angeles Times.
Slide show at the Arboretum
Posted on | September 14, 2011 | 1 Comment
Tomorrow, Thursday September 15th, I will be presenting a slide show in “Garden Talks with Lili Singer” at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in Arcadia. The subject: A year in a new garden, during which 9,000 square feet of lawn was removed to make way for a mixed native and food garden. The presentation will be followed by a field trip to the garden. Click here for details.
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden > Native Gardening
Image of the Day: Owens Valley
Posted on | September 12, 2011 | No Comments
Hat tip to the Great Basin Water Network for forwarding this link to today’s image from NASA Earth Observatory of Owens Valley (formerly lake) in the Eastern Sierra. “The present-day Owens Lake was once part of a much larger lake and river system along the northeastern border of California and Nevada during the Pleistocene Epoch (about 3 million to 12,000 years ago),” reads the NASA caption. “Melt water from alpine glaciers in the Sierra Nevada filled the regional valleys of the Basin and Range to form glacial lakes—ancestors of the now-dry lakebeds (or playas) of Owens, Searles Lake, and China Lake. While Searles and China Lakes dried out because of regional changes to a hotter and drier climate, Owens Lake became desiccated largely due to the diversion of the Owens River in the early 20th century to serve the needs of Los Angeles, 266 kilometers (165 miles) to the south.” Click here to keep reading about one of LA’s primary water sources at the Earth Observatory website.
The Great Basin Water Network is publicizing the image because it worries that proposed groundwater pumping in eastern, central Nevada by Las Vegas water prospectors might create the same kind of desiccation. While Vegas water managers steadfastly argue that Owens Lake was “surface water” and their Nevada project involves pumping groundwater, it merits pointing out that after LA drank Owens Lake, it began pumping the groundwater (for a 2010 look at pumping budgets and impacts, click here). Mitigating the air pollution that resulted from windborne dust now costs LA hundreds of millions of dollars and is a vexed, unfinished endeavor.
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > NASA Earth Observatory > Owens Valley
The Dry Garden: Knowing harm
Posted on | September 10, 2011 | No Comments
Many years ago, as a photographer and I were at work on photo essay for a Sunday magazine about some of the more accident-prone people in Britain, we found that home gardeners were high among the klutzes known by UK emergency room attendants as “heart sink patients.” Evidently the repeated sight of them made the hearts of emergency room staff sink. Their favorite times for calamity were three-day weekends, when in numbers disproportionate to the general population they fell off ladders, cut their fingers and sprained their backs. The photographer and I hoped that the photo series might reveal something about the mad cap determination of gardeners. However, before we had a chance to undertake the series in earnest, the photographer died in a plane crash.
Since moving to Los Angeles and taking up gardening, I’ve thought about that aborted series every Labor Day weekend for more than a decade. Early on, I learned that public holidays here also routinely claim “weekend warriors,” however Los Angeles emergency rooms are just as likely to receive hikers, surfers and various outdoorsy types for the simple reason that not nearly the same proportion of Southern Californians as Britons do their own gardening.
Does that by extension, I have long wondered, make gardening here safer? British gardeners tend to focus on fruit, flowers and vegetables. Injuries would reflect digging, pruning and the presence of thorns. Southern California gardens tend to be dominated by lawn and hedges. Many, perhaps even most, Southern Californians don’t mow their own lawns or prune their own hedges. To understand the injuries here, we’d need to study the generally poorly monitored population of mow and blow teams. Click here to keep reading ‘The Dry Garden’ in the Los Angeles Times.
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