The Dry Garden: Beware the foxtail
Posted on | August 19, 2011 | No Comments
Foxtail: Hordeum murinum in Voorhis Ecological Reserve, Cal Poly Pomona. Source: Curtis Clark / Wikipedia
A romp with your dog in the garden or park should be a happy thing. Life affirming! Usually it is, until your dog encounters the wrong plant. Then it can swiftly become pain and suffering, first for the dog, then for your bank account. Inspired by a recent emergency room visit with a terrier after what seemed at the time like a picture-perfect Kodak moment in a meadow, this is what amounts to a pet owner’s Most Wanted list of plants that can harm dogs, which gardeners should remove and hikers should avoid.
Top of my list, and also the lists of veterinarian Nancy Kay and UC Davis weed scientist Joseph DiTomaso are foxtails. Depending on where you live, these might be one of a number of grasses with needle-like seed heads. After a spectacularly wet winter and a mild, unusually long growing season this year, these are still standing, and at their most deadly – ripe, dry and brittle. In other words, the seeds are primed to imbed themselves in your dog. In Southern California, DiTomaso names as common foxtail-type grasses wild barley (Hordeum murinum) and ripgut brome (Bromus diandrus).
Click here to keep reading about a pawful weed in this week’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times.
Hoover Dam history at Huntington
Posted on | August 16, 2011 | No Comments
Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist with the Los Angeles Times and author of ‘Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century,’ will be speaking about the Depression-era dam project that made the desert bloom and Colorado River delta die. Date: tomorrow (August 17th) at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Garden. Time: 7.30pm. Admission: Free. Click here for details.
Hiltzik’s book, which was published last summer, is not a water book per se, though the sheer weight of water involved caused earthquakes in the Mojave. It’s not even a desert book. It’s a painstaking history of the politics that led to the dam being built, the heroics and tragedies in the construction, and how the West was won, or ruined, depending on your view point. The picture, above, from the book, captures a failed early schematic for the dam. For an earlier review of this very fine book, click here.
Hot news is bad news
Posted on | August 15, 2011 | No Comments
Global temperatures for July 2011 were the seventh hottest since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported today. The month was the fourth hottest on record for the US, with 41 states experiencing hotter than normal temperatures and two — Texas and Oklahoma — suffering the hottest. If one of the newer presidential candidates imagines that he can pray his way out of climate change, it merits noting that Dallas exceeded 100F for 30 of the 31 days of July.
California was among the seven states west of the Rockies to have normal or cooler-than-normal temperatures. Thanks to unusual Pacific currents, we’ve had a good water year after a decade of largely bad ones. While some heat is forecast, so far our weather has been balmy. Why worry? The best non-scientific answer to that question may be found in this lecture, posted by WaterWired, by philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore.
Moore argues that in spite of valiant efforts by scientists, most of us are behaving as if climate change isn’t happening. Why, when we’ve been told (and told, and told, and told)? Her answer is startling: Because we the public haven’t decided that it’s wrong to wreck the world. She begins her lecture, “What I’m going to do is to try to defend this premise: That taking whatever we need from the world to support our comfortable lives now and in particular degrading the rivers, creating unreliable fresh water supplies, impoverishing the ocean, creating an unstable climate. All these sorts of things I want to say are not worthy of us as moral beings.”
What to do? There are so many easy, immediate things that any homeowner can do right away. Don’t rip out the unused display lawn next year. Do it now. Don’t check the sprinklers next month. Do it now. Phenomenal amounts of greenhouse gases are created generating the energy to move water to Southern California, pressurize pipes, mow lawns, truck away clippings. Remove what lawn you don’t actively use. Mow what you keep less often and compost the clippings. Don’t put in a pool, put in solar panels and join a pool. Phenomenal reductions in green house gas emissions are possible by making simple, immediately achievable changes. Until then, none of us need to say that we don’t care about wrecking the world. Our gardens are saying that for us.
The Dry Garden: Palo verde ‘Desert Museum’
Posted on | August 12, 2011 | No Comments
A tree whose name translates from Spanish to “green stick” has performed a remarkable feat. Native to ranges in Southwestern deserts and once thought here as appropriate only for Phoenix or perhaps Palm Springs, the palo verde tree has become a favorite choice of Los Angeles landscape architects.
Click here for a Q&A with Mark Dimmitt in this week’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times. In it, the director of natural history at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson kindly talks about a selection of palo verde tree that, thanks to him, is now giving “xeriscaping” a good name.
The Dry Garden: Mulch now
Posted on | August 5, 2011 | No Comments
The end is in sight. On Sept. 30, California’s “water year” will end and meteorologists will begin measuring rain for another 12-month cycle. Gardeners will begin planting with the expectation of help from seasonal rains. Before then, however, we must get through August and September. Atop the to-do list: irrigate and mulch.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.
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