How to Garden With California Natives: Lessons from the 2016 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

April 5, 2016

...oxton/Clark garden: Or one of the many fantastic sheds in the Loxton/Clark garden: Or this inventive bit of garden art from the Hessing/Bonfigli garden in Altadena: Kelly and I both have mixed feelings about using found materials in a garden. I think the focus is often too much on telling a kind of visual joke, like when you, say put googly eyes on a old muffler and paint it purple. What works about the found art examples below and above from the...

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Defining a Garden’s Purpose

Mr. Homegrown

July 8, 2013

Garden Design, Gardening

13 Comments

...od isn’t practical? Organic Mechanics Succulents in the Organic Mechanic’s garden. The first stop on the Garden Blogger’s Fling was to a garden designed by Sean Stout and James Pettigrew (who, together, run a landscape design firm called Organic Mechanics). They turned the difficult space behind the apartment they live in—two small, very shady yards in adjoining buildings in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district—into a place to sit, eat and e...

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Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

Mr. Homegrown

July 10, 2017

Gardening

3 Comments

...ve teachers to part time work to assist the twenty-two regular teachers of gardening. A new feature-that of supervised home gardens–was added. This arrangement gave children not under school garden instruction an equal chance with those who were. The committee furnished the rules, prepared and supplied manuals, gave score cards, lists of plants, planting calendars, cultural directions, etc., helped with the planning of all gardens, handled and fur...

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What does the loving landscape look like?

Mrs. Homegrown

April 16, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening

18 Comments

...ns? By the sea? It could also come in the shape of a food forest or a rain garden or even a water garden. Although the loving landscape doesn’t have to be an exclusively native landscape, a good place to start researching is with your local native plant society or in the native section of your local botanical gardens and local nature preserves. Using resources like this, you can get a feel for the vocabulary of your landscape. You may also want to...

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Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom

Mr. Homegrown

August 18, 2015

Garden Design, Gardening

2 Comments

...process. I need this sentence tattooed on my forearm as I tend to want the garden to be “finished”. A garden is never finished, never complete, never the same. A garden is like the ever unfolding novelty of the divine logos; it’s never static; it’s always in motion. As Heraclitis says, “You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in.” Installing is the hard toil of garden making, placing is its pleasure. I t...

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