Search Results for: label/native plants/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

750 results

What is and is not a “Swarm” of Bees

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Animals, Bees
...working at gathering pollen and nectar (and as a side benefit helping the plants reproduce and make fruit by distributing that pollen). The bees you see hovering and landing on flowers are singularly focused on their work. They have no interest in you. It’s unlikely that they will sting, but it can happen if you brush up against one. Worker bees gathering pollen and nectar in your yard will never work as a group to sting you. Multiple stings from...

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Thankful for the New Rain Garden

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Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants
7 Comments
...Kelly has just started planting the wet lower part of the rain garden with native plants including water loving Douglas irises (Iris douglasiana). She planted the dry outer edges with desert willow (Chilopsis linearis), coyote mint (Monardella villosa) and assorted grasses. Alas, my hopes of building a little boat in which to row back and forth across our new seasonal pond have been dashed by the fact that our soil drains quickly (which is a good...

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The Theme of a Great Garden

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Garden Design, Gardening
6 Comments
...e is suggested through dramatic, rough stonework and the use of California native plants. The garden feels as if exists in a time before humans. It got me wondering how thematics would play out in a more modest home landscape. Perhaps, when it comes time to design a garden it would be useful to toss around a few abstract words and ideas to help unify the design vocabulary of the garden. Picking a theme or several related themes could make it easie...

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Quick Relief for Poison Oak

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Domesticus, Herbal Medicine, How-to
34 Comments
...n oak. I don’t know how I’ve been so lucky so far. I’ve heard that rubbing native mugwort on the skin can prevent/treat the rash, and I’ve done that a few times when I suspect I’ve brushed against some poison oak. (Mugwort almost always grows where the poison oak does.) Whether all these emergency poultices prevented anything or not is impossible to prove, because I’ve never contracted a rash until this time. I’ll keep doing it, though. After avoi...

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Anagallis monellii : A New Favorite

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Gardening
10 Comments
...es would like its many blue flowers. Anagallis monellii is a Mediterranean native, so it is well suited to the California climate, and it follows that it does not need much water. It is perennial in zones 9 to 11 (that’s us), but can be grown as an annual elsewhere. If you see Anagallis monellii without blooms, it is not much to look at. It’s a rangy, low-slung plant with uninteresting foliage. What it excels at is blooming. I believe it comes in...

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