The Dry Garden: Autumn leaves
WHILE the urban forests of Southern California lack the autumnal glory of Eastern woodlands, fall happens here. We do have trees that shed. Moreover, the annual drop of their canopies by hackberries, sycamores and pecans (to name only a few) is still a bonanza. From these leaves, and just about any leaf that flutters to the ground, comes leaf mold.
To keep reading this week’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times, click here. Photo: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times
UPDATE: To go on cyber-hikes finding fall with California Native Plant Society tour guide Jane Strong, click here. Or to sign up for an actual hike with the San Gabriel Mountains chapter of the CNPS, click here.…
The Dry Garden: A visit with Susan Gottlieb
Buckwheat in the garden of Susan Gottlieb. Photo: Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times. All rights reserved. Click on the florets to be taken to the Los Angeles Times Dry Garden column
They say that beauty comes from within, but in the case of Susan Gottlieb, it seems to come from the world around her. She is, at 67, not pretty, not handsome, but storybook beautiful. The former nurse has such an Alice in Wonderland-like grace and lightness that as she hops around her 1-acre garden in Beverly Hills, enchantment sets in.
Is she quite human?
Her husband, lawyer Daniel Gottlieb, chuckles thinking back to when he first showed his bride-to-be the house in the late 1980s. “She looked at the back said, ‘It’s all covered with ivy. There’s nothing for the birds.’ I said, ‘Can’t the birds make do with ivy?’ ”’
By 1990, the ivy was on its way out …
The Dry Garden: The Frenchman’s guide to (not) watering
COFFEE table books on gardening are generally so useless that it has been tempting to ask publishers to send review copies straight to the dump. Yet when Joan DeFato, retired librarian of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden, came to lunch bearing a big specimen that was not so much glossy as positively lacquered, I sat down and read it. Disbelief mounted with every turn of the page of the Thames & Hudson offering, “The Dry Gardening Handbook: Plants and Practices for a Changing Climate.”
This was a beauty queen with brains.
The author is nurseryman Olivier Filippi. A Frenchman, Filippi betrays an understandable fondness for the dry plants of his native garrigue, the French version of our chaparral. His writing is most poetic when touching on the “thick and sticky smell” of rockroses and the like. Yet as he pushes out beyond the south of France …
The Dry Garden: “If you want to save energy, save water”
WEEK before last, more than 1,000 climate experts from around the world gathered in Stockholm for World Water Week. If you didn’t read about it or hear about it on TV, it’s not necessarily because of the crisis besetting modern journalism. It could easily be the subject. If there is anything that can clear a room faster than a plague of toads, it’s discussion of climate change and water.
Peter Gleick, a MacArthur fellow and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, was in Stockholm for the meeting. He is, above any Californian, our man on the unmentionable.
So are there ways to address this topic, I asked Gleick recently, without leaving everyone feeling utterably depressed and helpless? Absolutely, Gleick responded. “If you want to save energy, save water.”
To keep reading Emily Green’s latest Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times, click here.
Correction: In an …
The Dry Garden: Look to the Sonoran
THE CLASSIC trees of California are big. Redwoods. Monterey pines. Valley oaks. So for those of us who live in cities but want a California native garden, where’s the giant sequoia supposed to fit? My vote would be to tear down the house, but San Juan Capistrano nurseryman Mike Evans has a different idea. The man who for two decades has been a pillar of the native gardening community thinks that many Southern Californian homes with small gardens can be better off with exotic trees. Evans, co-founder of the Tree of Life Nursery, is increasingly pointing his customers toward the leguminous trees of Mexico, Arizona and Texas … To continue reading the latest from the Los Angeles Times Dry Garden column, click here.…
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