The world according to Wordle
Posted on | January 16, 2011 | No Comments
Wordle produced this scatter cloud for Laguna Dirt. Click on the image for a link to a site with an exquisite collection of modern bird studies.
San Diego artist James Soe Nyun got to fiddling around with a scatter cloud program called Wordle and applied it to a number of garden blogs, first Californian, then from around the country. To see what emerged, go to his delightful site Lost in the Landscape.
The Dry Garden: Better than beautiful
Posted on | January 14, 2011 | No Comments
The former librarian at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden doesn’t remember exactly when the visitor wandered into her office and let drop that he was a descendant of George Engelmann. What Joan De Fato does remember is telling him that there was a grove of rare oaks on the site that had been named for his ancestor.
You don’t have to be a descendant of one of the fathers of American botany to share in what De Fato recalls as his pleasure and amazement. The arboretum’s grove of Quercus engelmannii, pictured above, is one of the last local stands of a native tree once so common to the foothills that an alternate common name is the Pasadena oak.
The first thing that strikes you upon reaching this group of roughly 200 trees is how much more animated it is by birds, butterflies and scampering lizards than the more cultivated parts of the garden.
The second is that it is drop-dead beautiful.
Better than beautiful. Engelmanns are the oak lover’s oak.
Click here to keep reading today’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times. This piece had been planned before it was announced that the felling of the nearby Arcadia woodland would take place this week. By coincidence, I was interviewing Los Angeles County senior biologist Jim Henrich about the Arboretum Engelmanns as nearby the county’s Department of Public Works began bulldozing 11 acres containing hundreds of established oaks and sycamores, including at least one Engelmann. More will follow on this site about why the county was allowed to raze pristine native woodland to make way for a sediment dump. I share the anger of the reader who has already commented today below the Engelmann article at the Times. In the meantime, for a snapshot of what we lost, and why it so desperately deserves protection, do visit the Arboretum’s grove of Engelmanns.
The week that wasn’t
Posted on | January 8, 2011 | 9 Comments
For those of you who missed the sign-off last Sunday, The week that was has gone the way of the TV show that inspired its name. Launched in June 2009, The week that was lasted nearly as long as the BBC comedy, with pay that would have been low by 1960s public television standards had there been pay. Producing a page that regularly featured both Wen Jiabao and Pat Mulroy was a labor of love, and of profound interest. The reward came in the kind of knowledge that can shut down a dinner party faster than putting Smithsonian Institute Blues on the stereo. When NPR broadcast a capable story about chlorine, chloramine and the way they interact with different plumbing media last week, TWTW had already roto-rootered that material in these pages every week since June 2009 and spent hours producing fiddly links for your clicking pleasure. An abiding interest developed in fracking, with this site becoming an unlikely but all the same core resource on the subject of a gas drilling technique that could very well lead to the contamination of groundwater in scary big swathes of the country. To be frank, part of the reason I am dropping the page is that while the readership was good, and occasionally excellent, the click-on rate wasn’t. To all of those determined to learn about water, I commend above all sources the search engine ProQuest, which is available to most Americans with a library card. For comprehensive daily coverage of California water, there is no better source than Aquafornia. WaterWired amounts to a free education and these websites are all tried and tested. For pure feist, check out On the public record. This site will churn on, with posts as time allows on my presiding passions: horticulture, water conservation in California and the future of the most beautiful place nobody ever heard of, the Great Basin. So, with deep thanks to all who read and supported The week that was, in a watered down variation of “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell,” Emily Green will be on assignment.
The Dry Garden: “Capacity” = good nurseries
Posted on | January 7, 2011 | 2 Comments
The potential for gardeners here to conserve water while glorying in the California experience is as big as the state. Yet most of us don’t seize it. According to local water managers, the problem is “capacity.”
By capacity, they refer to the ability of chain home improvement stores to stock drought-tolerant native and Mediterranean-climate plants alongside water-hungry turf. Building native-plant capacity in big-box stores is tough. The inventory get watered to death by untrained staff, who don’t know what the plants are much less what they need. So “capacity” tends to be code for “forget about it” when the subject of water conservation comes up.
Well, water managers, reality check. Nursery capacity for native plants is increasing, albeit slowly. A network of independent specialist nurseries is emerging. Most of these not only have trained staff to sell native plants but also offer courses on how to design gardens and how to tend those new Edens.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times. For January listings of Dry Garden Events, click here.
We should save Arcadia woodland
Posted on | January 7, 2011 | 3 Comments
Click on John James Audubon’s illustration of the Great-horned owl to be taken to a petition to save the Arcadia woodland by, among others, the Pasadena Audubon Society.
UPDATED Today marks a blogger solidarity day to save the Arcadia woodland. Chance of Rain is on board. This site has never linked to a petition for any cause before, no matter how worthy that cause may be. The case of this petition from the Sierra Club et al concerning the Arcadia woodland marks an exception not because it’s a good cause, but because it’s good sense. There is no adequate way to mitigate for the loss of such established riparian habitat from our slender Southern Californian reserve of mature native woodland. It is too rare and takes centuries to become established. Meanwhile, when it comes to choice of disposal sites for dam sediment, for which we are to believe that a clear-cut Arcadia woodland is the best option, there are countless other ways to employ that earthen mix, not least in landscaping to create parks or for sealing over landfill. We have a chance, albeit narrowing, to get this right. Let’s take it. Click here for background on the Arcadia woodland demolition proposal, along with a petition to save it from the Sierra Club, California Oaks, the Pasadena Garden Club, the Pasadena Audubon Society, the Sierra Madre Mountain Conservancy and San Gabriel Mountains Chapter of the California Native Plant Society. — Emily Green, January 7, 2011
LA Eco-Village Gardener’s Weblog
Pasadena Real Estate [blog] with Brigham Yen
From LA Creek Freak, blog solidarity organizer Jessica Hall writes, “LA-area place names like Encino, Los Robles (both Spanish for oak), Sherman Oaks, Fair Oaks, etc hint to us of woodlands past. An oak reputed to be 400-years old on Caltech’s campus demonstrates that their presence was no fluke. Oak woodlands belonged to Southern California. How many do you know of today?”
Click here for updates and more links
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