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

...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

...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

...timate the far-reaching beneficent effects of this civic housecleaning and garden-making campaign. The general conclusions arrived at by the committee are: that the chief lesson of the garden-paying for things through work-is within the understanding of even young children. A contestant, a girl of thirteen who had had three years of instruction in a school garden, when asked what she was going to put in her home garden replied: “Well, my father is...

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Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom

...r other waters are continually flowing in.” Installing is the hard toil of garden making, placing is its pleasure. I think I’ve spent too much time in the installing and not enough time contemplating the placing. In so doing gardening has become more of a chore than a pleasure. Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees. I take this to mean that a garden should express moods and ideas and not be just a collec...

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More on our gardening disasters

...to put the heart back into our garden. (Our Heart of Flax from way back in 2011) I thought I’d chime in on the subject of this year’s garden failures. Before I do, I’d like to thank you all for your kind advice and commiseration that you left on Erik’s post. First, I will agree that it really, truly has been a terrible year in the garden. Sometimes Erik gets a little melodramatic when it comes to the crop failure (e.g. the Squash Baby adventure)...

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