Virtual Native Plant Garden Tour, Garden 28, South Pasadena. Tour this South Pasadena native plant garden: front yard wildflowers, backyard flannel bush, flagstone paths, sustainable gardening practices.
sustainable
Keep It Messy for Nature
Native plants are only one element of a good native garden. Banish all leafblowers and machinary to make your garden hospitable to birds and other critters.
WISPPA: The Natural Side of South Pasadena
February 2, 2019. Expert panel and Q & A. Some things everyone can do to improve our natural environment in the time of climate change.
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 Finale
The work on the front yard patios is completed. I planted some grasses and other perennials but am waiting until next winter to plant a few shrubs. As promised in the previous blog post, here is a slideshow containing pictures from late February, when work started, to early April, after it was completed. I’m loving […]
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 […]
Successful Planting Party
Over fifty volunteers planted 209 native plants in the nature park on Saturday, January 27, 2018. This event, in honor of Martin Luther King’s call to service, included students from Occidental College, YMCA’s Youth and Government Program, and Professional Child Development Associates of Pasadena, and volunteers from the Bank of America’s My Environment Program and locals […]
Lawn-less sustainable garden
I got rid of the last bit of lawn in Wild Suburbia. We are lawn-less, lawn-free, turf-be-gone, but definitely not grassless! Deergrass, California fescue, melic grass, purple needlegrass, and even the non-grasses, blue-eyed grass (in the Lily Family), and rush (sometimes called rush-grass, in the Rush Family) have a place in my garden and in […]
Labyrinth Garden
I know that I have not written about my wild suburbia home garden in a long time. This is not because nothing is happening; to the contrary, the last piece of lawn has met its end! The small bit of turf grass – woefully out of place – on the east side of the front […]
Pruning (continued)
The last two posts – Garden Gloves, and Pruning Gooseberries – segue into today’s piece perfectly. Since we returned from the Pacific Northwest I have been cutting back the humongous sunflowers in the front yard. I don’t usually pull them out; rather, I cut the branches and smaller stems until there is only a main […]