The Dry Garden: Dead in the pot
Planting season in Southern California is rarely busier than midwinter, when nursery lots crammed with Christmas trees give way to displays of fruit trees and roses. If you’re haunting stores to select an apricot tree, a flowering bramble, a hedge or even a specimen tree, plant pathologist Jim Downer has a message for you: “Good gardening starts with good plant selection.”
By which he means: If the stock you find is root-bound, walk away.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.…
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: color me Western
It takes a hard heart not to swoon when the liquidambars that line so many streets in greater Los Angeles conduct their flaming descent into dormancy. As if entire city blocks drawn together in a season finale weren’t an eloquent enough elegy for a calendar year, the scarlet confetti of crape myrtle trees and the golden last gasp of ginkgos join the orchestra in a way that makes November and December the Southern Californian equivalent of fall back East.
There is, of course, a “but” coming, and it’s a big one. We’re not back East. Although the yearly curtain call of these exotic trees is undeniably glorious, they have a timing problem. It’s barely fall. Winter solstice is just four days away. How bothered you are by this lag depends on how you feel about leaf blowers working on Christmas Day.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in …
The Dry Garden: Season’s gleanings
We can’t all be Virginia Paca, the gardener profiled on this blog in October who grows food and donates it to food banks. But this winter those of us with orange trees laden with fruit might take a page from the book of that Pasadenan. What more fitting holiday activity could there be than to glean our home orchards and donate fresh fruit to local pantries?
As winter closes in, that fruit very well may be oranges. It is pure serendipity that an activity that feeds people is also good for the orange trees.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.…
The Dry Garden: She’s back
I met Dryden Helgoe six years ago when she was part of team behind a new landscape at Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena. Shortly afterward, I worked with her on a playground plan for a school garden. During both encounters, she was inscrutable: gracious, spookily competent and distractingly beautiful as a Botticelli angel. Then, by the end of 2005, she was gone — off to start a family.
During the intervening years, I wondered more than once if the choice of stay-at-home motherhood would retire Helgoe. When I met her, she was a rising star. The University of Oregon landscape architecture graduate had a year at the Olin Studio in Philadelphia and five with Nancy Goslee Power & Associates in Santa Monica. Helgoe’s disappearance from the scene left a void.
Click here to keep reading about Dryden Helgoe’s return to landscaping in The Dry Garden column of the Los Angeles …
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