Beyond green
FROM TODAY’s Los Angeles Times op-ed pages:
YOU KNOW it’s the silly season when a member of the Los Angeles City Council weighs in on the importance of green lawns during a drought, as the 12th District’s Greig Smith did several weeks ago. Yet the council member’s motion, which sought to reduce watering times but increase days of the week when watering could be done, exemplifies the frustration of homeowners across Southern California. “For more than a decade, we have had a policy of greening, not browning Los Angeles,” Smith said.
It’s poignant, this bid to find a water-savvy way to keep Los Angeles green. It cuts straight to the heart of the problem with the way we garden. It’s color. We, in common with Smith, have been taught that green is good and brown is bad. In fact, the opposite is true. …
Makeover city
SOME acronyms exist merely to make us sound drunk. The city of Long Beach’s BLBL is one. But what the Beautiful Long Beach Landscapes program lacks in mellifluousness, it makes up for in success. BLBL is a key part of a drive that has cut Long Beach water use by 16.5% since fall 2007.
To read today’s Dry Garden column on Long Beach’s raffle for makeovers in the newly redesigned Los Angeles Times online edition, click on I dig it. Wow, I mean, talk about makeovers!…
Cap and trading in Sacramento
THE Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been worried about the cost of complying with Assembly Bill 32, a 2006 law that requires California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, reports David Zahniser in the Los Angeles Times.
Last month, DWP officials decided to beef up their advocacy efforts in Sacramento by bringing in the author of the global warming bill, Los Angeles Democrat and former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, to advise the department’s team of lobbyists, writes Zanhiser.
…Department officials have voiced concern that AB 32 would result in a “cap and trade” program that requires utilities that rely on coal power, including the DWP, to purchase expensive pollution credits. That process could result in a “massive transfer of ratepayer money” away from the utility, said DWP spokesman Joe Ramallo.
To be taken to Zahniser’s full story in the Los Angeles Times, click here…
Pollinate me
California fuchsia photographed on the Bear Creek Trail in the Angeles National Forest. Photo: Ann Berkley. Click on the trumpet flower to be taken to the US Forest Service "Celebrating Wildflowers" page.
SOMEHOW during the hot, long days of summer, our native flora punctuates the dry season with flashes of color. Horticulturists speculate that the reason is sex …
Click here for the latest Los Angeles Times Dry Garden column on late summer bloomers, the queen of which is indisputably the California fuchsia, pictured left.…
The Dry Garden: Gravel is so much more than a way to cover up dirt
David Fross's garden at Native Sons Nursery in Arroyo Grande, CA
WHEN the son of friends began using his mother’s cellphone to photograph the ground at a Sunday lunch in the garden, we grown-ups laughed. “Look at Leon.” But when Leon’s mother began looking at her son’s photographs, then showed them to me, Leon had the last laugh. There, frame after frame, were abstract compositions of mesmerizing beauty. Were Leon’s downward-looking portraits to have a title, it might have been: “Dappled Sunlight on Gravel and Fallen Leaves.”
Gravel is so much more than a way to cover up dirt. As Leon noticed, its ability to catch light makes the garden floor a dancing field of shadows. Gravel also transforms the way heat, coolness and water are retained. Then, as powerfully as anything, gravel brings music to the garden. There is nothing at once so pleasant and intriguing as the sound …
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