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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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