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.…
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!…
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.…
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