How to Garden With California Natives: Lessons from the 2016 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

...ive chaparral. Spacing can be tricky. You have to pay attention to nursery labels and not plant too far apart or too close together. Not that plants always perform predictably. You have to go back and edit: fill gaps in or take stuff out. The best gardens on the tour got the massing right like the Hessing/Bonfigli garden in Altadena shown in the photo above. Outdoor Rooms My favorite garden on the tour is the Loxton/Clark garden in Pasadena. It’s...

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Be Idle!

...Black Friday, a day celebrated in the US with an orgy of consumerism and deadly Walmart stampedes, seems like a good day to repeat the Idler’s Freedom Manifesto. Named for a series of essays by Samuel Johnson, the UK based Idler publishes a magazine, holds online classes and puts out some beautiful hardback books....

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Saturday Linkages: On hold

...Keeping Crash Deaths From Skyrocketing Return of the conversation pit? The weird world of Bruce Goff This is why Venice is the most beautiful city in the world – A series of 40 facades of Venice More good urbanism this time in Malta Bluetooth-Connected Rotary Payphone...

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When Mushrooms Attack

...without a release of spores. After the battle the main protagonist of the series, Kotaro, meets a lonely latchkey kid, Daisuke, and gives him an experimental device that allows him to communicate with plants, as one does. Daisuke uses the device to communicate with mushrooms (I know, not a plant, but stay with me here). Handed such a device, let me just say that my first impulse would also be to communicate with the mushrooms to just ask them, li...

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