A Gardener's Thoughts & Fancies

The Monthly Gardner – March

March and April are the ideal times to get your garden planted. This includes most summer annuals and perennials, warm-season and cool-season lawns, some cool-season and warm-season vegetables, and almost all permanent garden plants, such as trees, shrubs, ground covers and vines. But I would hold off planting tropicals for a couple of months until [...]

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Saucy Succulents Exposed

I hoped the title might get your attention because succulents are a wonderful and extremely eco-friendly addition to any garden or planter, and, if you don’t already, you should know more about them. Besides creating colorful planters, as you will see by these photographs, I have included a couple of shots of a front yard [...]

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PERCH LA – Building A Garden In The Sky

Sitting on the north side of Pershing Square in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, Perch is a bar and rooftop French bistro that occupies the top three floors of 448 S. Hill Street. With wrap-around patios on its 15th and 16th floors, it offers views of Bunker Hill to the north, Pershing Square to [...]

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A California Shade Garden

I know the idea of writing about shade gardening while our temperature has been double digit may seem a bit oxymoronic, but what better time to contemplate a cool, shaded garden than during the middle of a heat wave. Yes There Is Shade In Southern California If you have native oak trees you can improve [...]

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Contemporary Landscape Design – What Is It?

I am often asked by potential clients, “Do you design contemporary gardens?” The answer, of course, is yes, not because I want the job – although that might be the case – but because the gardens I create are designed to do two things: express my clients’ needs and reflect or enhance the architecture of [...]

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Southern California’s Most Pressing Problem

This year’s California Landscape Contractors Association’s Landscape Industry Show offered, in addition to the usual garden art, nursery stock, turf equipment, fertilizer and lighting, a number of interesting booths and products designed specifically to deal with Southern California’s single most pressing problem – water, or lack there of! “Chinatown” or How Water Came To LA One [...]

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A Drought-Resistant Lawn … Is It Possible?

Here in Southern California the great big beautifully, rolling, grassy lawn is quickly going the way of the dinosaur. It’s not just municipal water regulations growing every more restrictive that’s causing it, but the ever increasing cost of water. In 10 years I predict that the “front lawn” will be but a memory and the [...]

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