The Dry Garden: “Reimagining the California Lawn”
Maybe you want to remove your lawn. Maybe you want to reduce it to make way for flowers, food or a shade tree. Maybe you don’t know what you want. A new book, written by three of California’s most knowledgeable horticulturists, lays out options.
It would be disingenuous to treat Reimagining the California Lawn (Cachuma Press, 2011) like any other garden book. It’s not. The authors have close to rock star status in the Golden State, something they possessed even before the 2005 publication of their first book, California Native Plants for the Garden.
Carol Bornstein, now a Central California garden designer, was for many years director of horticulture of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. The heart-stoppingly beautiful meadow there is her work. In 1976, David Fross co-founded Native Sons Nursery in Arroyo Grande and has since been the Johnny Appleseed of dry gardening. For many years …
April fully loaded
April 2011 may go down in the record books as the best month ever for tours, classes and plant sales held by Southern California’s gathering water and energy conservation movements. Click here for a full listing, then ready your date books. By all means check out the rest of the March calendar as well.…
The Dry Garden: Don’t fence me in
The iconic images of Los Angeles sold to the world typically involve palm trees, beaches and freeways. Those of us who live here, however, know that the true symbol of Southern California is probably a fence. Fences are everywhere. Chain link fences, wrought iron fences, barbed wire fences. Brick, cinderblock, and river rock fences. There is so much redwood fencing that it’s a wonder there are any redwoods left.
Leaving aside how ironic it is that there should be outcry about a proposed fence for the home of the mayor of the city of fences, what is rarely considered in our highly framed world is what all this fencing does to plants. This is worth addressing because that impact is profound.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.
Good chance of rain
Previously tentative forecasts for rain in Los Angeles have firmed up in the last several days. Below, top to bottom, are at-a-glance probability icons from the National Weather Service as of Thursday afternoon for Los Angeles County foothills (top row), basin (middle), and beach (bottom). To check your forecast, click here to be taken to the National Weather Service, then enter your zip code.…
Map of plume from Japan
UPDATED POST: A Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization model of radioactive material from the disaster in Japan carried in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times has been removed from this post. Comments relating to the map have been removed. Anyone wishing to comment should go to those papers. This website, whose core mission is conservation, was being overwhelmed (see graphic above). For information about trace radiation in California from the Japan disaster, by all means check your air quality management district. Or check daily radiation levels from this RadNet Service from the US Environmental Protection Agency. No further comments to do with this remaining stub post will be published and earlier comments have been stricken.
March 25: National Public Radio has this excellent story about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization monitoring, Built for bombs, Sensors now track Japan radiation.…
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