The Dry Garden: In praise of Elmer Avenue
For all-around grooviness, a Sun Valley block that two years ago had no sidewalks, no street lights, no storm drains and no curbs should be next spring’s hot ticket on the home-tour circuit. Thanks to a newly completed makeover involving one federal bureau, one state agency, as many as six city agencies, three nonprofit groups and 24 homeowners, Elmer Avenue has become the Rolls-Royce of L.A.’s Green Street initiative.
Click here to keep reading in the Los Angeles Times about how the makeover of one block in the San Fernando Valley has resulted in a mass transition to drought tolerant gardens and the capture of 16 acre feet of storm water a year.…
The week that was, 7/4-10/2010
Detail from Watts Towers. Photo: Emily Green. Click on the image to read Robin Rauzi argue in the Los Angeles Times, "An Angeleno who has never toured Watts Towers is the urban equivalent of a New Yorker who has never bothered with the Statue of Liberty."
Emily Green is on vacation. The week that was will return July 25th. However, for those following the Las Vegas pipeline story, one announcement from Carson City deserves noting.
“The water rights issued to the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) under the 1989 applications in Spring Valley, Cave Valley, Dry Lake Valley and Delamar Valley will revert to application status.” — State Engineer of Nevada, July 7, 2010
Los Angeles water news is currently being most capably watched and explained by the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times. For daily round-ups of California water news, try Aquafornia, the newsfeed of …
The Dry Garden: Zausch and Di
Timing is everything when you’re a plant in a place with little water and lots of competition. Our native California fuchsia, Zauschneria californica, has patience. It remains sedate as the native sages and lilacs burst into spring blossom. Then, as the early bloomers slip into summer dormancy, this discreet gray-green shrub flowers, and flowers, and flowers, often straight through autumn.
Click here to keep reading about Zauschneria californica and its Uruguayan counterpart, Dicliptera suberecta, in The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times. Or, if you’re too mad to think about good flowering plants for hummingbirds because you really, really hate someone, buy them this book, reviewed today in the Los Angeles Times.…
The Clean Water Act applies to the LA River
Have concrete, will create. A painting from last year's exhibit “The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River" at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. For background on the show and grafitti culture of the LA River, click on the image.
The US Environmental Protection Agency has reversed an earlier US Army Corps of Engineers classification of the Los Angeles River as un-navigable, a term that exempted it from protection under the Clean Water Act.
After William Mulholland and Los Angeles tapped Owens Valley and the Eastern Sierra for its water in 1913, in the 1930s, the Corps paved the LA River, the city’s original source. This turned the river into a main drain of a county-wide flood control system. The upshot: Los Angeles drained the Eastern Sierra, destroying the once crystaline Owens Lake and nearly destroying the neighboring Sierra Mono Lake, while the city that Mulholland’s aqueduct …
‘To catch a raindrop’
“The water that you’re looking at would all percolate into the ground if it weren’t paved," Mark Hanna, a Department of Water & Power engineer, told Judith Lewis Mernit during a rainstorm last winter. To read Lewis Mernit's story on the lost rains of Los Angeles, click on the image to be taken to the website of the new literary quarterly Slake, or look for Slake from independent booksellers.
A January storm sweeps across the northern Pacific on the jet stream and hits Southern California with prodigious amounts of rain, writes Judith Lewis Mernit in the premier issue of Slake. It brings wind, too: bursts up to eighty miles per hour lop the tops off palm trees, waterspouts swirl, and a small tornado lifts catamarans thirty feet in the air. Here in Sun Valley, in the northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley, hail clatters so loudly on the …
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