LA’s Parkway Garden Dilemma: Not Fixed Yet

August 20, 2013

...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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Planting in a Post-Wild World

Mrs. Homegrown

October 19, 2015

Back to the Garden, Garden Design, Gardening

25 Comments

...er, the ground cover layer, and the filler layer. Plants stacked on top of plants. Plants intertwining. Plants giving way to other plants as the seasons progress. Another pic from the book showing the system of vertical layering in the design process. They give concrete examples for how this would work in three different types of archetypal plant communities: open grassland or meadow, woodlands/shrublands, and open forest. These three community ty...

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When it’s time to remove a tree

Mrs. Homegrown

October 22, 2015

Back to the Garden, Garden Design, Gardening

11 Comments

...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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A Plea for Plastic Vegetables

Mr. Homegrown

September 22, 2014

Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...se let me know if you carry any of the following: 1. Purple Bulb Shaped Eggplants and Eggplant plants 2. Green and yellow squash (zucchini) 3. Cucumbers 4. Red Hot chilly Pepper Plants 5. Red Cherry Bomb Plants 6. Yellow Banana Pepper Plants 7. Green bean (string bean and lima bean) plant that is vine-like that I can weave onto a trellis or a vine that looks like the leaves of a string bean plant 8. Tomatoes and Tomato plants (All Varieties) 9. Gr...

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Leave Your Leaves Alone

Mr. Homegrown

January 2, 2019

Gardening, Native Plants

1 Comment

...an plant dialectic here, perhaps? Are we on the cusp of a synthesis in the native/non-native plant debate? This is a complicated question, but I think that Eisenstein makes some good points in this provocative interview. Props to David Newsom at the Wild Yards Project to allowing this conversation go where it went. Eisenstein goes on to talk about what she considers most important for attracting birds and insects to our gardens. Spoiler: it’s more...

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