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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 [...]
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 [...]
I’ve been accumulating photos of the ever-present succulent arrangements I see all over town. All over town might be an exaggeration. It’s just possible that I tend to gravitate to places where there will be succulents. But there’s no denying that they are still the Edie Sedgwick of the horticultural world, the It plant of [...]
Spring is moving fast here in Southern California. I’ve already checked out some of the gardens on our host’s site for Bloom Day, Carol at May Dreams Gardens, and saw lots of traditional spring shrubs and bulbs and perennials like hellebores in amazing colors just coming into bloom. Slowly but surely spring is spreading across [...]
My birthday took up just about every single day last week, and more days on the weekend, which is how I rationalized a trip on Saturday to find that hitherto unknown-to-me, unmet, spectacular plant that would forever after be marked as my, gollum gollum, birthday present. (Because we wants it.) At our house we always [...]
Walking off Easter dinner, what caught my eye last evening was a petite bloom on the melianthus, the first I’ve seen on this cultivar ‘Purple Haze.’
I’m really starting to believe now it is the holy grail, a dwarf melianthus, since even the flower is diminutive.
Last evening poppies [...]
Last week I planted out in the garden the remaining plants I brought home from last summer’s travels. All winter I eyed these purchases nervously, as though they were exhibits in a trial of my weak character. I knew they were impulse buys of wonderful plants I had no business bringing home, since there wasn’t [...]
I’m sure these images have been kicking around design blogs for some time, but if they have I’ve missed them. (Found here at Miluccia, via the magazine Ideat.) It’s easy to become numbed by the tsunami of photos of interiors available online, but this one snagged my full attention. The light, the chairs, the fascinating [...]
I admit I’m a vulgarian, if there was any doubt left. By February I’m starved for brash and garish, even though it violates the subtle order of nature that has spring unfolding with a delicacy that builds by degrees to a late summer, over-the-top crescendo. I go straight to over-the-top, and containers of [...]
This Pacific Palisades garden was the final garden we visited 1/24/13 with Lili Singer via the LA County Arboretum Thursday Garden Talk series. Despite being firmly in the grasp of winter this January morning, or as firm a grasp on winter as Los Angeles can manage, all three of the gardens sparkled on this rainy-day [...]
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