The Dry Garden: Meet the natives
It’s only February, but bestirred by rain and gathering days, California lilacs are blooming, manzanitas are bedecked with bells and irises are pent up for a March explosion. It doesn’t just feel like spring, it is spring in Southern California. So, if you are considering a dry garden for your home, now is the time to meet the natives. This is the moment to go to Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont. Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.
For listings of courses, hikes, plant sales and projects for Southern Californian dry gardeners, click here for a February calendar, and here for a March one.
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Spring
Chance of Rain is pleased to announce that a March calendar of hikes, courses, projects and plant sales for Southern Californian dry gardeners is finally loaded. To access it, and for the remainder of February listings, click on the links:
FEBRUARY 2010
MARCH 2010
If you have an event that you would like to have included in the listings, but is not there, please e-mail Emily Green at emily.green [@] mac.com.…
Whereas we screwed up the first time …
Behind the rain shadow, the news just gets more eye-popping. This deliciously poker-faced article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal is dated today but went live yesterday. Today, yesterday. Today, twenty years ago. What is time when there is groundwater in five rural basins in central eastern Nevada and to the south, hot dry Las Vegas wants it?
Time, it turns out, is the issue. Last month, the Supreme Court of Nevada ruled that the State Engineer had violated the due process rights of those protesting a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline proposed by Las Vegas. Under the law, hearings awarding Las Vegas rural water that began in 2006 should have begun in 1991.…
The week that was, 1/31/2010-2/6/2010
that seems to have a mind (and
change it: isn’t that what makes
a mind, its changing?) not much
prone to thinking – rather, thoughts
curl through it, salt or fresh, or hang
between states; sometimes gloss
the surface with their oil-illuminations.
Wind-worried to dullness, pulled two ways
(earth and moon like parents not quite
in accord), unquiet body, it can never
quite lay down its silt; always trying
to be something other, to be sky,
to lose itself in absolute reflection.
*
— “Betweenland 1,” an extract from “The Water Table” by Philip Gross, Financial Times, February 6, 2010
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The Dry Garden: Grand illusion
In his 1982 autobiography “My Last Breath,” film director Luis Buñuel wrote:
A year can go by, even two, without so much as a single cloud in the impassive sky. Whenever an adventuresome cumulus wandered into view just above the mountain peaks, all the clerks in the grocery next door would rush to our house and clamber up onto the roof. There, from the vantage point of a small gable, they’d spend hours watching the creeping cloud, shaking their heads and murmuring sadly: “Wind’s from the south. It’ll never get here.”
And they were always right.
May a Los Angeles filmmaker one day match the elegance with which the Spanish-born Buñuel exaggerated the dryness of his native Aragon. Annual rainfall there is much like ours: 12 to 15 inches a year.
But when it comes to exaggeration here, our tendency is to overstate the rain. Ever notice how much it …
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