Piet Oudolf’s Enhanced Nature

...the overall design. The fruit in the fruitcake are what he calls “primary” plants, “high-impact plants chosen for strong color or structure.” Like the fruit in the fruitcake primary plants repeat in clumps throughout the overall design. He suggests a 70% matrix plant to 30% primary plant ratio. Lastly, Oudolf introduces “scatter” plants, sometimes by literally scattering seeds that will pop up seasonally and introduce spontaneity and wildness. Oud...

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LA’s Parkway Garden Dilemma: Not Fixed Yet

...parkway, I also think that the city should be encouraging the planting of native and Mediterranean plants. My advice for the Bureau of Street Services for their new regulations: Consult the community: activists, landscape architects, non-profits and individuals like Ron Finley. If you had done this the last time we would not be wasting time and money to re-craft the parkway regulations. Throw out your plant lists. There are a lot of species of pl...

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When it’s time to remove a tree

...e a talk, both with the garden as a whole and with the individual plant or plants you are going to remove. (You may feel silly doing this, but you know, KonMari would have you do this with your socks and old mobile phones and IMHO it’s a heck of a lot less silly to do this with plants than with your household clutter.) Speak from your heart. Don’t be embarrassed. Explain your vision, addressing the entire garden as a totality. It is made up of man...

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Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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Weeds into Fertilizer

...just happen to be very good at taking up nutrients from relatively poor soil. The point here is let your weeds rot in water and you get a nice fertilizer. This is better than water into wine as far as I’m concerned. Which reminds me that I want to try making dandelion wine this spring…. So many of the plants that people consider weeds, like dandelion and nettle, are nutritious and medicinal plants. My favorite part is that they are easy to grow an...

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