Category Archives: agaves, woody lilies
a cautious welcome to 2026
A pot of posole bubbles on the stove as the garden soaks up last night’s downpour. I’ve moved on from coffee to green tea to quiet a scratchy throat. The spicy posole will be therapeutic as well. Then maybe a … Continue reading
rainiest December in LA history
Los Angeles is having its rainiest December ever, which has everyone on edge because wildfire-scarred land doesn’t absorb rain well and tends toward runoff. A good portion of this rainy munificence fell inconveniently on heavy travel days over the 24th, … Continue reading
notes from the December garden/Los Angeles
December temps have been in the 80’sF, astonishing even to this lifelong Angeleno. Fairly quickly I’ve re-adapted to the prevailing attitude that keeping track of the weather is mostly irrelevant here. I left checking hourly weather forecasts behind in Oregon … Continue reading
resuming rambles around town
Spending winter in Los Angeles means I get to indulge a lifelong passion for looking at old stuff that goes way back to thrift-shopping in high school. (Seriously, we were dressing like Annie Hall before the movie came out.) Other … Continue reading
cleaning up the zone 10 summer garden
Checking in on the Long Beach garden, it feels a little like cleaning up after a party that you weren’t invited to. In summer’s aftermath, it’s all about reading the seedpods and dessicated growth for clues of what vegetative frivolity … Continue reading
two gardens in late May/early June
I spent two days at the end of May in Long Beach (garden USDA zone 10), readying the house for some friends’ upcoming stay. (The second day, May 30, topped 95F — what a homecoming!) The profligate weediness in the … Continue reading
abandonment issues
With just one week until we depart for Oregon, the Long Beach garden has finally taken a shape that feels horticulturally logical to me, according to my tastes and the slim resources it will have available in my absence. A … Continue reading
O Huntington!
It’s been too long! In my absence the past few years, there are now reservation requirements, QR codes, and repeated checkpoints throughout the gardens to reverify the QR codes. There’s also sushi in the very crowded cafe to refuel after … Continue reading
Posted in agaves, woody lilies, garden travel, garden visit, succulents
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touring summer gardens
Lately I’ve been dipping more and more frequently into photos taken while garden touring last summer with the Garden Fling, a highly recommended garden tour group. Compared to what’s being reported in this crazy news cycle, making and caring for … Continue reading
Erodium pelargoniflorum and other indispensable reseeders
Erodium pelargoniflorum is commonly described as a perennial, but it behaves as a late winter/spring annual in my zone 10 Long Beach CA garden. It reseeds as prolifically as California poppies, and sheets of seedlings carpeted the front garden every … Continue reading