The world according to Wordle
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
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 …
The week that wasn’t
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 …
The Dry Garden: “Capacity” = good nurseries
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 …
We should save Arcadia woodland
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 …
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