Here in California, there have been some rumblings about gardens wasting water. Can we afford water for gardens in an era of limited resources? Isn’t our native habitat beautiful enough? Do we want to have gardens here? Well of course, I am biased. I am a gardener. And yes, we certainly do want to have [...]
The deciduous magnolia trees have started their bloom here in California. The calendar says it is winter, so I suppose we must call them winter flowering trees, but for those of us who garden in California, the season most of the world calls winter, we call spring. This is a summer-dry climate which means winter-wet, and [...]
No doubt if you are reading this you know that gardening is an art. And, as is often true with art, one form inspires another. A recent stroll in the University of California Berkeley Botanical Garden brought so much of this together. Art appreciation is something we do every time we visit a museum, go to [...]
Can succulents recover from a hard frost? It depends. Let’s look at a southern California nursery’s display garden before nighttime temperatures dropped into the mid-20s F: Here’s the same Euphorbia ammak ‘Variegata, after the frost: Likelihood of recovery: Nil. Too much of the tissue was damaged. But what about the Euphorbia tirucalli ‘Sticks on Fire’ behind it? It’s hope of recovery [...]
I thought selecting my favorite photos of 2015 would be easy for my final Gardening Gone Wild post of the year. That is, until I had to actually narrow down the choices. What follows are surely 10 of my favorite photos, but I can’t say they are my absolute favorites – my overall list is 26. This is a [...]