The Dry Garden: Carol’s list

Salvia clevelandii. Photo: Sean Masterson / For the Los Angeles Times

AT A packed hall of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden last week, horticulturist Carol Bornstein was asked by assembled Southern Californian park keepers how native plants would do in landscapes irrigated by reclaimed water.

To read what the author of “California Native Plants for the Garden” advised in this week’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times, click here

For information on how to attend Bornstein’s presentation on the sensory impact of native plants this Thursday night (October 8th) at the Southern California Horticultural Society meeting, click here and here for her October 15th talk on the same subject at the Solvang public library.

The Dry Garden: Bird baths

Click for a larger image. A Cooper's hawk cools its feet in an inner city fountain. Photo: Emily Green

This being the height of migration season for Western songbirds, and conditions around Los Angeles being bone-dry or fire-scarred, here’s a proposal for even the driest of dry gardeners: Get out your hoses.

There is no better time to set up a birdbath. To keep reading The Dry Garden on bird baths, click here to be taken to the Los Angeles Times.

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

Western datebook

THERE  are two weeks left to see Downstream: Colorado River Photographs of Karen Halverson at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanic Gardens (left) and only one week left to catch “H2O,” an exhibit on water by four photographers at the G2 Gallery in Venice. Pictured below is a sample from Ron LeValley.

Or for freshly stuffed listings of Dry Garden Events around the Southland, click here.

Then again, with fall migratory season in full swing, there is no better time to set up a bird-bath, as proposed by this bird-watcher in this week’s The Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times.…

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