Dormancy in the southern California garden
garden photos
Spring is coming
Visit the South Pasadena Nature Park to enjoy the CA native wildflowers.
After the flowers
Wildflower season is “past peak” and I’d like to remind you that the glorious, youthful, bright flowers now enter the very important stage of making and dispersing seed. Though my camera is still drawn to brightly colored flowers, I try to point it at the broken stems, brown seed pods, and graying leaves that are […]
Lawn-less Sustainable Garden (continued)
We are making big changes to our yard. As you may remember from earlier posts, I was not happy with the burned out lawn in the front yard. Years of drought left much of the lawn brown. With city water restrictions, I watered for the large deodar cedar – deeply and infrequently – allowing the […]
Pacific Northwest Nature Garden
Spending time in the Pacific Northwest provides an important contrast to my Southern California Wild Suburbia. Wild Suburbia is sunny, hot, and dry. It is aromatic, gray and tan. The sun is strong and bright, even harsh. The Pacific Northwest has its own magic. It is a land of tall trees, ferns, and mosses. Sunlight […]
Pacific Northwest Cottage Garden
It has been foggy here on Orcas Island in the San Juans. I woke to thick mist, the sound of fog dripping from conifer trees, and the low, melancholy song of fog horns. Once I woke up, I remembered that following the flurry of blog posts on drip irrigation in June (Irrigation basics, Controllers, Drip […]
What should I plant?
This is the perfect time to prepare your plant for upcoming native plant sales and fall planting! This slideshow presents garden-worthy plants from woodland, scrubland, chaparral and desert plant communities. Barbara is a South Pasadena-based native plant gardener, horticulturist, writer and blogger. Her recent book, Wild Suburbia: Learning to Garden with Native Plants, guides new […]
Orcas Island Garden Tour
Garden tour of five special gardens featured by Orcas Island Garden Club
Brown is a color
Summer in my garden is mostly brown, with beige highlights. The fallen leaves are cool, crunchy, and comforting. Soft gray spider webs are sprinkled around in grass, on trees and suspended in mid air. This is summer in Southern California.
Wildflower headshots
It is almost the summer solstice but there are still lots of flowers blooming in the nature park. There is a mighty fine display of California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum). Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) is also blooming, a harbinger of lovely red berries in winter. Wild sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) are just getting started, standing tall with several blooms per stem. […]