The Dry Garden: Seeing a park about a toad
It’s raining this morning in Altadena, California. Emily Green, that would be me, is on vacation and will be back next week columnizing about how to garden in dry conditions when it’s not so conspicuously wet. In the meantime, read Louis Sahagun’s piece in the Los Angeles Times about how Forest Lawn Cemetery wants to fell 835 oak, sycamore and walnut trees to make way for new paying customers, aka dead people. Then opt for woodland burial or cremation. Or check out Jeff Spurrier’s series on community gardens in the Home Section. Later today, the Home Section blog will include a photo essay by staff photographer Anne Cusack on the sprawling hillside cactus garden of UCLA plant physiologist Park Nobel. No morning is complete in this house without checking Aquafornia, the newsfeed of the Water Education Foundation. This being a vacation, however, even that pleasure may be supplanted …
The Dry Garden: Park plans for LA
We were warned. In 1930, in “Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region,” the Olmsted brothers and Harland Bartholomew urged the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to set aside land and funds to create 70,000 acres of parkland running from the mountains to the Pacific. Considerable lengths of the “pleasureways” would trace natural rivers where parkland could double as flood control boundaries.
“Study has unearthed no factor which indicates that the people of this Region will be permanently satisfied with lower standards than those of other great communities,” they wrote, “and many that point toward the expediency of higher standards. The big question is whether the people are socially and politically so slow, in comparison with the amazing rapidity of urban growth here, that they will dumbly let the procession go by and pay a heavy penalty in later years for their slowness and timidity.”
Unafraid to appear …
The Dry Garden: Smell the roses
This may not be the time to plant a rose, but as a long rose season concludes its spring flush, it is an ideal moment to study the varieties around town, then consider which ones you like and what they might do for your garden.
How such hardy plants spawned the modern rose care industry will one day make a fabulous subject for a business writer. A 2004 Home cover story titled “Rethinking the Rose” challenged the idea that roses need pampering, if stumping their branches in winter, drenching their roots in summer, dusting the foliage with fungicides and filling their arteries with systemic pesticides can be called pampering.
What is worth picking up on here and now is that few notionally water-loving plants transition quite so seamlessly into the Mediterranean-climate garden.
Click here to keep reading about roses in the Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times. If …
Helianthus annuus, now and then
SUNFLOWERS are the true American beauty. They have it all: stamina, fast growth, architecture, fecundity, attitude and, above all, color. The proportions twixt stem and head are so sweetly comical that all it takes is the sight of a sunflower display at Trader Joe’s to defuse the rage that brews daily in its parking lots.
In the wild, sunflowers are so stunning that driving down the 110 past Dodger Stadium, it is hard not to crash as one catches sight of a freeway verge studded with gold. As L.A.’s hillsides turn brown in late summer heat, somehow wild sunflowers still glow from the brush.
Click here to keep reading about how the only thing different from the sunflowers that you buy in Trader Joe’s and the wild type that you see to the freeway (and in the photos, left), is 4,000 years of cultivation. It’s not a recent Dry Garden …
The Dry Garden: Hillside wonder
Illustration: E. O. Murman / Margo Murman, from "Cacti, Agaves, and Yuccas of California and Nevada"
This is the time of year when even those hostile to the idea of water rationing in the garden have their heads turned by what nature has created without sprinklers. Rising from the untended hills of Southern California are spires of ethereal white flowers. They’re so big that you can see them from hundreds of feet away. If they’re backlit, double that distance.
There’s no right name for the plant that produces these arresting plumes. Common terms vary from Quixote yucca to Spanish bayonet to even the reverent Our Lord’s Candle. Science has no straight answer either. As genetic analysis continues to shake up traditional taxonomy, the botanical name is slipping from Yucca whipplei to Hesperoyucca whipplei.
Click here to keep reading about chaparral yucca in the Los Angeles Times and the wonderful …
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