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Rain Garden Update
Root simple reader Julia requested an update on the rain garden our landscaper Laramee Haynes designed and installed in 2019. Laramee’s rain garden idea solved two problems by taking care of a...
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Thankful for the New Rain Garden
See an update on this post here. One day during a high school English class, here in Southern California where I grew up, it started raining. The entire class spontaneously got up and ran to the...
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Beautifying the Home Grounds: Your Source for 1920s Outdoor Project Inspiration
I have a simple design process here at the Root Simple compound. I ask the house what it wants. The house, being a fuddy-duddy, vaguely colonial bungalow build in 1920, invariably tells me that it want...
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Backyard in Progress
This morning I thought I’d update progress on the garden. A crew from Haynes Landscaping worked hard over the past week to clean up our backyard and install the hardscaping for a rain garden fed by...
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There is Something Beyond the Straw Bale
Fig tree off the front porch. As usual, when I blog about our small vegetable garden as I did on Wednesday, I neglect to put that small part of the food growing efforts at the Root Simple compound in...
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A Lemon Arbor
Consider this post one of those inspirational ideas we’ll never get around to but perhaps an ambitious Root Simple reader will tackle: a lemon arbor. You can find this particular lemon arbor at...
View ArticleThe Wild Yard Project
Storyteller and native plant evangelist David Newsom’s Wild Yard Project seeks to transform the lawn wasteland of our built environment. According to the mission statement of the Wild Yard Project,...
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Win Two Tickets to the 15th Annual Theodore Payne Native Plant Garden Tour
If you’re a Southern California local we’re giving away two tickets to the 15th annual Theodore Payne Native Plant Garden Tour that will take place on April 14th and 15th. It’s a self-guided trip...
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How to Garden With California Natives: Lessons from the 2016 Theodore Payne...
First, a rant. The good side of the drought and irregular weather we’re experiencing here in California is that it provides an opportunity to rethink our unimaginative “mow and blow” residential...
View ArticleMosaic Artist Jeffrey Bale
Jeffrey Bale is one of my gardening heroes and this video is, in my opinion, mandatory viewing. Bale’s artistic medium is the pebble mosaic and he’s taken his craft to levels not seen since the...
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Our new front yard, part 6: it’s all potential at this point
A bright spot is the new plantings: a hummingbird sage is blooming for Christmas I’ve been putting off posting pictures of the plantings in our front yard because it just doesn’t look all that exciting...
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Our new front yard, part 5: Constructing a meadow community
One of the many tracing paper overlays that I used to think through the placement of the plants Okay, I’m back to the series which never ends after a break for flipper fence building, Thanksgiving and...
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Our new front yard, part 4: a digression on the new paradigm
Detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, c.1500 A couple of comments have come in on my last post remarking that this way of designing a yard (inspired by Planting in a Post-Wild...
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068 Planting a Post-Wild Garden
This week I interview Kelly about the ideas behind the remake of our front yard. We talk about why we took out a bunch of stone fruit trees and Kelly discusses how the principles in Thomas Rainer and...
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Our new front yard, part 3: design
The endless series continues! In this post, I’ll cover the design principles I used (or at least tried to use) as I planned our landscaping. As I’ve said in the previous posts, this project was...
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Our new front yard, part 2: theory
Erik’s Sketchup rendering of the front yard. In my previous post, I discussed the history of this little patch of slope which we’re trying to redesign. Now I’ll talk about the ideas behind the...
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Our new front yard: history
Our front yard a couple of weeks ago. This is a “before” picture. Recently we posted my enthusiastic review of Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West. In it, I mentioned that I...
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When it’s time to remove a tree
I was standing in our friend David’s back yard, talking with him about the difficulties of re-designing your garden. One of them is removing trees and shrubs, not because of the physical labor–though...
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Planting in a Post-Wild World
The front lines of the battle for nature are not in the Amazon rain forest or the Alaskan wilderness; the front lines are our backyards, medians, parking lots, and elementary schools…This book is...
View Article![Cloonee, Yandel & ATLAC – Movimiento – Single [iTunes Plus M4A]](http://i.imgur.com/Q8tO40p.jpeg)
