Japanese Garden in Los Angeles
You can learn basic elements of garden design by visiting the Japanese garden in Woodley Park in Van Nuys, starting with the entrance gates. There are three contiguous gates, but only one is open. ...
Category Archives: Urban Gardening
Whitefly Combat
If you happen to have a persistently annoying insect pest in your garden, doing absolutely nothing about it may be the best form of managing its spread long term. In due course, natural predators ...
Ask Me How
Rarely do you encounter someone who is the essence of goodness but Dan McCollister, in my humble opinion, is such a person. There is also an undeniable genuineness about him and the fact that he com...
Of Cabbages and Kings
“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: . . . of cabbages and kings.” (from Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll) It is no wonder that cabbages make an appearance ...
History of the Potato
I have written about Michael Kappel in this column on several occasions and I am about to do so again. Kappel, who gardens in Westwood despite a disabling spinal cord injury, offers unique solutions ...
How to Handle Pepe Le Pew & Friends
For several weeks, I had regularly observed a corpulent skunk waddling around my house after dark. A neighbor pointed out that my old cr...
A Luddite’s Paradise
Loren Zeldin doesn’t have a computer or a cell phone or even a camera. But he does have a garden, which is the focus of his...
Wisteria
Breathless in Jerusalem. The sights. The sounds. But mostly the people. The light is extraordinary. Each person is illuminated, without and within, physically and spiritually. Did you ever look...
90 Year Old Grows Abundant Tomato Crops
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.” These words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the famous author, came to mind durin...
Growing Strawberries in Granada Hills
Granada Hills resident Richard Mueller could be the king of Los Angeles strawberry growers. He recounts his success as follows: “About 20 years ago, I bought about 20 plants of the Sequoia vari...
