The Dry Garden: Here’s to the Egolf Tree
An artist friend of mine calls crape myrtles “living bouquets.” In the hottest weeks of summer, the man to whom we owe thanks for the white, pink, lavender and red bouquets now before us, often un-watered and somehow unwilted, is Donald Roy Egolf. From 1958 until his death in 1990, Egolf was a plant breeder at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. His contribution was so outstanding that this column, besides constituting the deepest of bows to those wonderful plants, bears the suggestion that we rename the crape myrtle the Egolf tree, or Egolfus donaldii, so as to take in many new compact and shrub forms.
Click here to keep reading a Labor Day salute to Donald Egolf and crape myrtles in the Los Angeles Times.…
“The drought is over…”
After taking this photograph of a Southland Sod truck on the Santa Monica freeway in Los Angeles, garden designer Catherine McLaughlin said, “I’ve been trying to get it for weeks without crashing my car. I see it everywhere.”
The California “drought” — if water shortages in a naturally dry place can decently be called that — was declared over on March 30th, 2011 after one exceptionally good water year in the Sierra. However, the part that the Southland Sod company didn’t put on this ad was the line from Governor Brown’s proclamation, “It is strongly encouraged that all Californians continue to minimize water usage and engage in water conservation efforts.”
McLaughlin works for the Topanga-based landscape firm Rodriguez & Satterthwaite, and posted this today on that sustainable design-build company’s blog. Hat tip to Kimberly O’Cain, water resources specialist for the City of Santa Monica, for circulating the …
The Dry Garden: I should
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Imperial Valley and Salton Sea
Aquafornia editor Chris Austin's slide show on the Imperial Valley and Salton Sea.Three deserts and the fourth estate
Perusing a new water book in Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena last June, I found myself reading various passages (sample above) that were strikingly similar to descriptions from a series that I reported and wrote for the Las Vegas Sun in 2008. There was no right response and there were plenty of wrong ones. The story of which wrong ones I chose, along with some notes on intellectual property law as it applies to a steadily vanishing population of original reporters, is in today's Los Angeles Review of Books. Click on the comparison copy and maps to be taken to LARB. Map source: US Geological Survey.
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