How to Make Your Own Wine
Winemaking in Woodland Hills? Why not? Grapevines can be grown almost anywhere, including Woodland Hills, which has the highest recorded temperatures in the summers and lowest in the winters in Los A...
Category Archives: Advice
Flowers and Crop Rotation
The comfortable days of October are the best days to plant. This is true not only from the standpoint of Valley gardeners, but from the standpoint of trees, shrubs, ground covers, vines, bulbs, just ...
Kids entertained with planting seeds
Spring is traditionally heralded as the best season for planting seeds, but autumn is an equally propitious moment for this activity.In fact, you can create a new garden – by starting plants fr...
What to Plant Near a Pond
Q: We have a small backyard with a small pond in one corner. When we had the yard landscaped, we ended up with two Melaleucas near the pond. Bottom line, the roots from the Melaleucas have taken over...
If that plant’s a dud, replace it
If you have lived in the same neighborhood for nearly three decades, as I have done, and if you are an obsessive plant watcher, as I have been, you will have witnessed a fair share of horticultural f...
Water-thrifty plants to grow in your parkway
I am forever on the lookout for successful parkway plants. Here, parkways refer to those narrow strips of ground in residential neighborhoods between sidewalk and street. Traditionally, parkways have...
Sensible choices for growing trees in limited spaces
Just the other day, in North Hollywood on Sylvan Street, I bumped into two of my favorite trees. One was a pineapple guava (Acca or Feijoa sellowiana) and the other was a mayten (Maytenus boaria). Fo...
A shining example of a successfully planted slope
You can grow just about anything in our part of the world, and Helen Amritraj’s plantings on a quiet street in Calabasas provide a clear demonstration of this sublime horticultural truth. Up an...
Plums, apples and the best kind of berries to grow
I have been privileged to harvest ‘Santa Rosa’ plums, grown in my own backyard, for more than 25 years. My first ‘Santa Rosa’ tree produced fruit for 20 years and then stopped...
Ideally, Trees Should Never Be Pruned
Whenever I hear a complaint about trees, I am reminded of our precarious relationship with them. As part of our immediate environment, we demand that trees should be as close to us as is physically p...
