Categories

pattern seekers

That’s one thing at least we all have in common. And a craving for pattern is thankfully one of the easiest (and possibly the healthiest) to satisfy.

Unknown objects found at flea market. The seller thought they may have been used in making chocolate.

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Ethan Hawke fondles switchgrass at the High Line

There’s an attention grabber. No, that’s not a recent tabloid headline and, yes, I am being facetious, but I find it amazing that the High Line (and switchgrass!) is casually slipped into a bit of puffery about the current goings-on of Ethan Hawke.

From the May 13, 2013, issue of The New Yorker: “Ethan [...]

the disappearance of summer lawns

Lawns are vanishing all over town. The chief ringleader and instigator is the Long Beach Water Department, with their irresistible Lawn-to-Garden Turf Replacement Program. Quite a few of my neighbors have already taken advantage of this program the past couple years, and more applications for the $3K rebate are being accepted now. There will be [...]

cleaning day

Any garden/home tour that incites me to clean out the office is money well spent. Cleaning for me has never been a daily spritz here, a light bit of dusting there, but a long-delayed, ferocious, all-out assault when conditions become unbearable, when the work surfaces disappear under piles of magazines. The house keeps itself going [...]

notes from the Venice Home & Garden Tour 2013

Postcards from Venice Home & Garden Tour 2013

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tricks for the plant collector

A garden book among the many I’ve read that I’m reminded of almost daily is Pamela Harper’s “Color Echoes.” My synopsis goes like this: The eye is lonely and craves relationships, and will wander around restlessly to seek them out, but is easily satisfied even if you provide only the barest of excuses for associations, [...]

Rick Frausto’s Kitchen Window With Beakers

When photographer MB Maher was in town a couple days ago, I told him that I keep bumping into one of his images in my travels through blogs and Pinterest boards. It’s one he took many years ago of Los Angeles artist and set designer Rick Frausto’s delicate, high-wire, aerial ballet of beakers, flasks, [...]

Rolling Greens Culver City (tillandsia porn)

A fresh shipment of tillandsias had just arrived when I visited Rolling Greens yesterday for their 75 percent-off sale, which ends today. Almost all of these little bromeliads were in bloom or about to bloom. Lordy.

Like agaves, most tillandsias are monocarpic. After blooming the main plant dies, but will leave behind [...]

Lili Singer’s Thursday Talk with Isabelle Greene

“Sixteen years ago I was writing only prose and what I consider now traditional garden writing for magazines. And then one day I was in my office looking at a landscape architecture magazine, turned the page, and there was an image that had an enormous physical effect on me. I had a sense of utter [...]

cochineal

“Under the seams runs the pain.” ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

I’ve been going over my notes the past couple months from Dr. Alejandro de Ávila’s remarkable lecture “Blood on a Fountain,” which he gave this past January at the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley’s final “Natural Discourse” symposium, trying to shape [...]