I’m back from my trip, and I’ll post some of the trip pictures here soon. Two weeks away during prime growing season can guarantee that you’ll come back to surprises. I knew tomatoes grew quickly, but, dang, what was I… Read More »souvenirs
Confession time. I have this fixation on Antarctica. Most people who go to spas and do time in hotels with pool bars don’t understand it. But, as with all other perfectly honorable fetishes, it’s surprising and reassuring the number of… Read More »the danger of houseplants
At the risk of sounding too much like Christian on Project Runway, I’m about to embark on a little “vay-cay.” I leave San Diego on Wednesday in my old Jeep Cherokee for what could be its last major trip to… Read More »destination: yellowstone
A little while back I wrote about the Critical Mass photography awards. One of the “Top 50” photographers, Lucas Forest Foglia, had a series based on a community garden and the people who interact there. Left: Lukas Forest Foglia: Savuth… Read More »gardens as social spaces
Here’s a plant I hadn’t grown before, the Mariposa Lily, Calochortus superbus. The first plant to bloom was creamy yellow, almost white, with very few markings. It had a remarkably lacy petal thing going on–but that was due to insects… Read More »mariposa lily
Here’s a project that I’ve been thinking about doing for a while, something that I see combines classical bonsai, European topiary traditions, and 60s minimalist art. About a month ago I finally took those thoughts out into the garden. It’s… Read More »extreme "bonsai"
One of the things I like to do in art museums is to look at the fruits, flowers and vegetables in still life paintings from a couple or more centuries back. Often I recognize exactly what the plant life is,… Read More »more ancestral vegetables
Saturday I put some seeds of Armenian cucumber into the ground. There are heirloom vegetables and then there are ancestral varieties like this, varieties that go so far back into history that to grow them and have them at your… Read More »ancestral vegetables
In celebration of Cinco de Mayo, here’s a patch of the garden featuring the red, white and green colors that dominate the Mexican flag. The plants: Celosia ‘New Look’ (intense red, on the left) Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips’ (red-and-white bicolor… Read More »cinco de mayo plant combinations
The first time I encountered work by Wolfgang Laib I almost walked past it. The piece consisted of several uniformly-sized sulphur-yellow piles of some substance, each only a very few inches high. Some artwork you look at and you get… Read More »wolfgang laib: a different sort of botanical art