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Growing Greens Under Fruit Trees
In the photo above is Scott Kleinrock showing off a section of the edible garden he designed at the Huntington Gardens. At first glace it looks like a lot of weeds, but it’s a clever idea: growing...
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How To Design a Garden Step II: Using Google Earth to Draw Up a Plan
So you’ve set the goals for your garden, as we outlined in a post earlier this week, and you’re ready to start putting pen to paper. Google Earth makes it easy to quickly create a plan to scale. Zoom...
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How To Design a Garden Step III: Pathways
So you’ve set your goals and have a scale drawing of the land you plan to garden. What’s next? Paths! Paths keep you from compacting soil and lend visual interest to your garden. Some tips: Establish...
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How To Design a Garden Step IV: Clues to Care
Clues to care at the Huntington Ranch In the landscape architecture biz, “clues to care” is a phrase meaning that a garden has some sort of indication that humans were involved. Those clues could be...
View ArticleThe Ecology Center of San Juan Capistrano
Kelly and I had the privilege of doing a short talk this weekend at the Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano. If you’re interested in Southern California food forestry, greywater, chickens, you name...
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Qualitites of a Good Outdoor Room
Our front porch. One of the features of gardens that I like is that they tend to be divided into smaller spaces, what has come to be called outdoor rooms. The Ecology Center, that we visited on...
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Garden Design: Quantity vs. Quality
There’s an old saw, probably apocryphal, about a ceramics teacher who divided her class in two, made one half spin as many pots as possible while the other struggled to create one perfect pot. The...
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Garden Design Trends: Interplanting and Plant Communities
The Daily Telegraph garden designed by Sarah Price. Landscape architect Thomas Rainer has a new post on his blog looking at some current garden design trends. Two of these trends intrigued me: what...
View ArticleThe Present Order is the Disorder of the Future: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little...
Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay spent forty years creating his garden. He called it “Little Sparta,” a reference to the battle he fought with the town council who wanted to tax it,...
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Piet Oudolf’s Enhanced Nature
A garden designer has the difficult task of balancing texture, color, and space while simultaneously dealing with the unpredictability of nature. Long ago I gave up on the idea of ever being good at...
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Defining a Garden’s Purpose
Organic Mechanic’s Garden in San Francisco I’m an idiot when it comes to garden design. To up my skills in this department I attended the annual Garden Blogger’s Fling last week, which took place this...
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Annie’s Annuals and Perennials
The artist Sandow Birk once did a show depicting a fictitious war between Northern and Southern California. If that war were to be fought by plant nurseries, the forces of Northern California would...
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Yes, We Do the Pinterest Thing
What do I use Pinterest for? To gather design ideas for home and garden. I just built this trellis to grow vegetables vertically. It’s part of a plan I have to deck over an ugly concrete patio. The...
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Getting Hardscaping Right
A water feature at Keeyla Meadows’ garden in Berkeley. One of the many lessons I learned on the tour I took of Bay Area gardens as part of the Garden Blogger’s Fling is that you’ve got to get the...
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Stencils as Garden Art
Seneca has a posse. I’ve been looking at a lot of garden design books lately. These books always contain a photo illustrating the concept of the focus point, which is inevitably an 18th century marble...
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Horticultists
Michael Tortorello has written another great article for the New York Times, “Marriage is Yard Work.” The article details the San Diego garden of Ryan Benoit and his wife Chantal Aida Gordon. The two...
View ArticleVillage Homes: A Model for Sustainable Suburbs
I’ve recently discovered a truly inspiring housing development in Davis, California. This is not new news–it was built in the 1980’s, but it’s new to me and worth sharing. Village Homes is the...
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Viewpoints in the Garden
Mrs. Homegrown put a lot of hard work this past fall into some new plantings for the backyard. As a result there’s some nice viewpoints developing. I thought I’d take a few random pictures to...
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The Theme of a Great Garden
Today we toured one of the finest gardens in California, the new garden at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. The occasion was the opening of the new pollinator habitat. Head gardener Richard...
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Bees will love your Coyote Brush Hedge
Image: Wikipedia (our picture of the NHM’s coyote brush hedge came out blurry–which really is a shame because they were good looking hedges. You wouldn’t guess it from this pic). One of a series of...
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Why Your Garden Should Be Dark at Night
A confession: I was a teenage astronomy geek. This hobby that gave me an awareness of how depressing it is to live in a city so brightly lit that you can count the number of stars in the night sky. A...
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Can our landscapes model a vibrant future? Not according to the LA DWP.
California is suffering from drought. In Los Angeles, we’ve experienced back to back two of the driest winters on record (winter is our rainy season). Last year’s rainfall total was under 6 inches....
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Looking for Tough, Drought Tolerant Plants?
For Californians, you need look no further than UC Davis Arboretum’s searchable list of All-Stars. The horticultural staff of the UC Davis Arboretum have identified 100 tough, reliable plants that...
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Garden Magician Jeffrey Bale
Image: Jeffrey Bale. Do yourself a favor today. Fall into mosaic and garden designer Jeffrey Bale’s blog and spend a few hours in awe of his work. He has a new post up showing a garden he built from...
View ArticleAn ancient food forest
An intriguing short video by permaculturist Geoff Lawton about a food forest in Morocco. It does leave me with questions, though, such as: what sort of labor does it take to keep this system going?...
View ArticleRenting and Homesteading
College student Sheila Cassani transformed her rental unit in Oakland California into a beautiful garden space she calls Kansas Street Farm. She’s turned a small space into a productive paradise with...
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Mulch, mulch, mulch!
I like the color contrast going on here between pinkish fallen avocado leaves and the grey-green foliage of this California Fuchsia [This is one post in a series of posts on the loving landscape,...
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Admitting Gardening Mistakes
The unhealthy factor that I bring to our marital garden design dynamic is a resistance to change and a unwillingness to admit mistakes. Take, for instance, the stone fruit trees in our front yard. The...
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Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom
Photo of Ian Hamliton Finlay at Little Sparta by Murdo Macleod. Recent developments in our front yard landscape that will go unmentioned led to an evening of reviewing the works of my favorite poet,...
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A Neoclassical Native Bee House
Inspired by the LA Natural History Museum’s bee houses on poles, I dashed off my own version in Sketchup. It’s an homage to Ian Hamilton Finlay. Kelly is supportive but skeptical. I’m hoping it can be...
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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...
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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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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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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, 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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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 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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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 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...
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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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...
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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...
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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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...
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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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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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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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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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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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