The Dry Garden: Fall planting season
The question comes every spring as our state flower, Eschscholzia californica, blooms. “Is it too late to plant poppies?” The answer is no, it’s not too late. It’s perfectly late. Whether sowing wildflowers, or planting perennials and woody herbs and shrubs, or putting natives into the ground, the best time to plant here is in late fall or early winter. The idea is to do what the plants do naturally: Get seed in the ground in advance of the coming rainy season.
Click here to keep reading this week’s installment of The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times…
Green season
If you’ve ever wondered when to plant lettuce, watch for dandelions. Every spring and autumn, these urban wildflowers signal the start of temperate periods when the region has warmed up or cooled down to the point that it’s salad season.
Click here to keep reading this week’s dry garden column in the Los Angeles Times.…
The Dry Garden: Knowing harm
Many years ago, as a photographer and I were at work on photo essay for a Sunday magazine about some of the more accident-prone people in Britain, we found that home gardeners were high among the klutzes known by UK emergency room attendants as “heart sink patients.” Evidently the repeated sight of them made the hearts of emergency room staff sink. Their favorite times for calamity were three-day weekends, when in numbers disproportionate to the general population they fell off ladders, cut their fingers and sprained their backs. The photographer and I hoped that the photo series might reveal something about the mad cap determination of gardeners. However, before we had a chance to undertake the series in earnest, the photographer died in a plane crash.
Since moving to Los Angeles and taking up gardening, I’ve thought about that aborted series every Labor Day weekend for more than a decade. …
The Dry Garden: Beware the foxtail
Foxtail: Hordeum murinum in Voorhis Ecological Reserve, Cal Poly Pomona. Source: Curtis Clark / Wikipedia
A romp with your dog in the garden or park should be a happy thing. Life affirming! Usually it is, until your dog encounters the wrong plant. Then it can swiftly become pain and suffering, first for the dog, then for your bank account. Inspired by a recent emergency room visit with a terrier after what seemed at the time like a picture-perfect Kodak moment in a meadow, this is what amounts to a pet owner’s Most Wanted list of plants that can harm dogs, which gardeners should remove and hikers should avoid.
Top of my list, and also the lists of veterinarian Nancy Kay and UC Davis weed scientist Joseph DiTomaso are foxtails. Depending on where you live, these might be one of a number of grasses with needle-like seed heads. After a …
The Dry Garden: Palo verde ‘Desert Museum’
A tree whose name translates from Spanish to “green stick” has performed a remarkable feat. Native to ranges in Southwestern deserts and once thought here as appropriate only for Phoenix or perhaps Palm Springs, the palo verde tree has become a favorite choice of Los Angeles landscape architects.
Click here for a Q&A with Mark Dimmitt in this week’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times. In it, the director of natural history at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson kindly talks about a selection of palo verde tree that, thanks to him, is now giving “xeriscaping” a good name.…
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