The Dry Garden: Sheltering nests
Some of us are familiar with the concept of stilling the saws to allow birds to breed, but we follow an Eastern calendar. Unfortunately, that time frame doesn’t apply in Southern California. Whereas bird-nesting in the East is a spring event, it begins here in winter. Two of our most beloved local hummingbirds, Allen’s and Anna’s, started nesting in December and will be nesting throughout spring, says Kimball Garrett, collections manager for the ornithology department of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Click here to keep reading the Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times.…
Western datebook: “There it is. Take it.”
In a December article for Chance of Rain, Southern California irrigation specialist Bob Galbreath recalled the arrival of Owens Lake water in Los Angeles from the Eastern Sierra and William Mulholland’s 1913 exhortation, “There it is. Take it!”
Take it we did — with such abandon that a century later our water supply is on the verge of exhaustion. Galbreath, who for two decades has preached abstemiousness in the form of drip irrigation over sprinklers, concluded the article by musing, “Perhaps it would help if I put out a big pile of drip tubing at my next seminar and said: ‘There it is. Take it!'”
Perhaps indeed. To see if he does, go to his talk on January 7th at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, where he is the first guest of the new year in …
Image of the day: ‘Borderlands’
Chris Linder’s photograph of a sagauro cactus, icon of the Sonoran desert, is part of the 13-person show “Borderlands,” which opens tomorrow at the G2 Gallery in Venice, California.
Sponsored by the International League of Conservation Photographers, the exhibit documents life along the fence dividing Mexico and the United States.
“Borderlands” runs until February 7, 2010. Click on the image to be taken to the gallery.…
The week that was, 12/27/2009-1/2/2010
Revelers go for a New Year's Day swim in Malo-les-Bains, northern France, January 1, 2010. Photo: Reuters. For the Toronto Sun's gallery of New Year's Day plunges around the world, click on the bathers.
“I found out about it when I was about eight, and I never manned up to do it. But now I did.” — Twenty-two-year-old Jeffrey Vanek, while pulling up his boxer shorts amid catcalls from 500 people, “Naked water skiing, Bloody Marys and breakfast burritos — it’s the 30th Annual Bethel Island Frozen Bun Run,” Contra Costa Times, January 1, 2010…
The Dry Garden: ‘Canyon Prince’
OF ALL the creatures that disperse plants in nature, we humans may be the quirkiest. Take how we distribute New Zealand flax. We fight back its blades along what seems like every other front walk.
This column is to commend an indigenous alternative to New Zealand flax for the gardens of greater Los Angeles: a type of giant wild rye called Canyon Prince. Ninety-nine percent of the time that flax is used in California, this cultivar of Leymus condensatus could perform the same function, but better.
To keep reading the lastest installment of the Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times, click here.…
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