Posts Tagged ‘plants’

Func­tional sculp­ture at Gar­den Temple

This is the kind of store, a life chang­ing sort of store, that makes me want to open the same busi­ness so I could spend all of my time there. That is kind of what hap­pened with David Mills, who with wife Mari, founded Gar­den Tem­ple in in Stu­dio City in 2002. Prior to open­ing the show­room David trav­eled the world buy­ing and sell­ing eth­nic art, includ­ing stone basins from Cen­tral Amer­ica. It seemed a log­i­cal next step to install pumps, but the logis­tics are more com­plex. “We get the stone in var­i­ous states of com­ple­tion from India, Guata­mala, Vietnam.…than the foun­tains are fin­ished locally. “I love being in a cre­ative busi­ness that offers a bit of nature in the city,”  says David. “I grew up in the val­ley and miss the open spaces. This is a neigh­bor­hood space. We wel­come peo­ple to come in and wan­der around, like the fam­ily with small chil­dren who come almost every weekend.”

The sim­ple, attrac­tive forms David designs and fab­ri­cates facil­i­tate water flow and fall. “We also install and main­tain our foun­tains, and we are very safety con­scious. It’s also impor­tant that the parts under­neath that you don’t see are durable  and made of high qual­ity mate­r­ial.” Gar­den Temple’s large out­door show­room and indoor area show­cases hand chis­eled stone troughs, basins and blocks, cop­per ves­sels, exotic indoor plants and planters.

Gar­den Tem­ple, 13055 Ven­tura Blvd., Stu­dio City, 91604 /​ 818−783−0079 /​ 10 — 5 /​ 7 days a week /​ www​.gar​den​tem​ple​.com

On the web: Burkard Nurs­ery in Pasadena is hav­ing their Labor Day sale Fri­day, Sep­tem­ber 3 thru Mon­day Sep­tem­ber 6. All items 30% off. (626) 796‑4355 /​ www​.burkard​nurs​eries​.com /​ More infor­ma­tion in Find a nurs­ery under East Val­ley and beyond.

Cal­i­for­nia native plants

I recently toured Matil­ija Nurs­ery with owner Bob Suss­man, who started his grow­ing busi­ness about 16 years ago. Nes­tled among the orchards of Moor­park, this SoCal nurs­ery car­ries a choice vari­ety of native plants, and  native and hybridized irises. Bob has pro­vided Socal​nurs​ery​plants​.com with the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion about native plant growing:

What to do now???  The end of the sum­mer dog days.……

In case you haven’t noticed, this is the most chal­leng­ing and demor­al­iz­ing time for a native gar­den, espe­cially a new native gar­den. The rea­son for this is that a native gar­den, or any gar­den for that mat­ter, always has a com­po­nent of trial and error.  Most of us tend to focus on the “error”,  what didn’t work and what died?  This was indeed the case at a recent con­sul­ta­tion I went to last week where the new gar­den was going through its rough first year.

Most native plants flower intensely in spring but by sum­mer things are going the other way.  There are non-​​violent solu­tions to all of this and things to do like main­te­nance and planning.

You can start cut­ting back things that “need it”. Things that need it are salvia’s, sphear­al­cea, encelia, grasses and even matil­ija pop­pies but not cean­othus or man­zanita. Clear out leaf lit­ter except under oaks — my pref­er­ence. Weed and spread mulch. That will give every­thing a much neater and cleaner look while keep­ing the ground cooler and plants greener.

Plan­ning! What croaked and what didn’t? What looks good dur­ing the sum­mer heat? Most casu­al­ties occur in the first year.  While there are many rea­sons for plant casu­al­ties, it’s gen­er­ally “wrong plant, wrong place”, but you may not know this until the first sum­mer. Then you find out.  What to do?

Repeat the suc­cesses and not the fail­ures. Look at those things that did well and plant more of those. Go to the native plant nurs­ery (Matil­ija Nurs­ery) or botan­i­cal gar­den in summer/​fall and see what looks nice and in flower!!!!.  Then, plant the plants that are both flow­er­ing and/​or look nice.

Flow­er­ing plants put the focus of your eye on the flow­ers and not the part of the land­scape going to seed or in to dor­mancy.   Here’s a par­tial list of what is flow­er­ing now: lessin­gia, ero­gonum grande rubescens ie red buck­wheat (fin­ish­ing now), Cal­i­for­nia fuch­sia, chilop­sis lin­earus (desert wil­low), mala­cotham­nus nutalii (bush mal­low) and abu­tilon palmeri.

Matil­ija Bob will now do con­sults for about $100 per visit depend­ing on where you live and you get a 20% dis­count cer­tifi­cate good for 60 days on nurs­ery plants to boot. Way bet­ter and cheaper than a psychologist!

Go to www​.matil​i​ja​nurs​ery​.com for more arti­cles like the one above.

Now this is a bicycle!

I was impa­tiently antic­i­pat­ing Flora Grubb Gar­dens and was not dis­ap­pointed! I was in fact wowed by this ulti­mate urban gar­den resource. Set in an indus­trial area of down­town San Fran­cisco, Flora’s green king­dom  encom­passes a soar­ing indus­trial build­ing filled with witty dis­plays, ver­ti­cal gar­dens and unusual plants and con­tain­ers. Ser­vices offered include cut­ting edge flo­ral designs (suc­cu­lent wed­ding bou­quet, any­one?), gar­den design and main­te­nance and a palm bro­ker­age. Flora Grubb Gar­dens has a ter­rific web­site and newslet­ter: check it out @ Flor​agrubb​.com. She also offers sem­i­nars and speakers.

Bot­tle tree @ RBG

I am vis­it­ing my brother Scott and his wife Kate in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. They live in Wal­nut Creek, about 25 miles east of San Fran­cisco and at the foot of Mount Dia­blo (site of a recent con­tro­versy con­cern­ing the name “Mt. Devil”, but that’s another story). There is a trea­sure right down the street from their house, the very first project of the revered Gar­den Con­ser­vancy.  That would be Ruth Ban­croft Gar­dens, ded­i­cated to the  preser­va­tion of as fine a col­lec­tion of water con­serv­ing plants as you will find on the planet. Started by it’s epony­mous founder in 1971, the 3 acre gar­den is located on a fruit farm owned by the Ban­croft fam­ily since the 1880’s. I have always found suc­cu­lents easy to love for their form, color, ease of pro­poga­tion and most of all archi­tec­tural good looks. The suc­cu­lent and cacti col­lec­tion @ RBG is thrilling for it’s con­trast­ing tex­tures, forms and col­ors, espe­cially in the spring.

The bot­tle tree (Brachy­chi­ton Rupestris) shown above is lit­er­ally a giant suc­cu­lent. Using it’s trunk for water stor­age, the Aus­tralian native  is slow grow­ing up to 40′ in height; it doesn’t dis­play the bot­tle shape until 15 years along. The good news is that if you have more money than time the bot­tle tree can be trans­planted very easily.

Ruth​ban​croft​gar​den​.org