Posts Tagged ‘herb’

Where did you say they put that garden?

One of the last fron­tiers of gar­den­ing? You guessed it, the top of a New York City bus! One of the recent arti­cles in a favorite blog of mine, Urban Gar­dens (www​.urban​gar​densweb​.com), car­ried this story about NYC designer Marco Anto­nio Cas­tro Casio. He wrote his grad­u­ate the­sis, “Nomadic Urban Archi­tec­ture” fea­tur­ing mov­ing gar­dens like the one you see here.

“If a gar­den were planted on the roof of every one of the 4,500 buses in the city’s bus fleet,” cal­cu­lates Cosio, his busses could add 35 acres of new rolling green space in the city. That’s as much as 4 Bryant Parks. Meant for the pub­lic bus sys­tem, the first gar­den was installed on the BioBus, a mobile sci­ence library. In this photo the gar­den is 5 months old and com­prised of suc­cu­lents. Next? How about a veg­etable and herb garden..and they say there is noth­ing new under the sun!

Site for Marco Casio: www​.bus​roots​.org

On the web:

Thurs­day, Feb­ru­ary 17

• Plant Favorites from the Hunt­ing­ton Nurs­ery with Shirley Kerins @ the Arbore­tum: A spe­cial pro­gram for plant nuts! Our guest speaker will dis­cuss and show a range of flow­er­ing and herbal flora eas­ily grown in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia gar­dens. The morn­ing ends with a plant sale. Shirley, a land­scape archi­tect, is nurs­ery man­ager, man­ager of plant pro­duc­tion and plant sales and cura­tor of the Herb Gar­den at the Hunt­ing­ton Botan­i­cal Gar­dens. She also designed the Kallam Peren­nial Gar­den at the Arbore­tum. 9:30 — noon, $20/​class — (626) 821‑4623 or jill.​berry@​arboretum.​org

Sat­ur­day, Feb­ru­ary 19

• Ship­ley Nature Cen­ter: A Fam­ily Cel­e­bra­tion to Save the Mon­archs, 10am — noon, Pup­pet show, crafts and more @ Hunt­ing­ton Beach Cen­tral Park, free park­ing @ 17851 Gold­en­west St. near Tal­bert, info: (714) 842‑4772 or www​.ship​ley​na​ture​.org
• Square Foot Gar­den­ing Work­shop @ the Arbore­tum: 10am-​1pm; Square foot gar­den­ing uses only 20% of the land space of a con­ven­tional gar­den and saves both water and time. There is no till­ing of the soil so any­body can do it. Learn how with Jo Ann Carey. $25/$28 non­mem­bers
  Pre-​registration required, call 626.821.4623

A mossy foun­tain at Laguna Nursery

This is a dif­fi­cult post to write because most nurs­eries are spe­cial in some way. Every com­mu­nity needs and deserves a gen­er­al­ized “gar­den cen­ter” for obvi­ous rea­sons (espe­cially since Tar­get has closed all of theirs — yea!). So I’m not nec­es­sar­ily talk­ing about ser­vice, selec­tion or price. With des­ti­na­tion nurs­eries some­thing more inde­fin­able is usu­ally in play, start­ing with the pas­sion of the owner. Most of the nurs­ery men and women I’ve met love what they do — which is lucky for us in this harsh eco­nomic cli­mate. But it is much harder to spe­cial­ize because it cuts down on clien­tele. So, need Aus­tralian plants? Go to Jo O’Connell’s Aus­tralian Native Plants Nurs­ery in Ojai. Jo pro­vides Aus­tralian plants to the Hunt­ing­ton Botan­i­cal Gar­dens, among many oth­ers. Want your roses grown locally and accli­ma­tized — Otto and Sons in Fill­more has an enor­mous selec­tion. How about a cus­tom top­i­ary spelling out your name? Get it at Eden Nurs­ery in Orange County. Two nurs­eries that spe­cial­ize in jaw drop­ping foun­tains, planter arrange­ments, orchids, gar­den fur­ni­ture and acces­sories: Laguna Nurs­ery in Orange County and Rolling Greens Nurs­ery in Cul­ver City. Upland Nurs­ery in Orange County has 350 vari­eties of plume­ria. Does your spouse want to see a phe­nom­e­nal car col­lec­tion while you shop for petu­nias? The only place for that is Simpson’S Gar­den Nurs­ery in San Diego County. Also in San Diego County: Botan­i­cal Part­ners with every bam­boo imag­in­able, and Jun­gle Music for collector’s palms. The own­ers of these nurs­eries (Ralph Evans and Phil Bergman, respec­tively) will give you help in decid­ing what will do best in your gar­den — they want you to suc­ceed and come back for more. Of course, that is true of all nurs­eries, large and small, gen­eral or specialized.

I have a “Des­ti­na­tion Nurs­ery” list­ing at the bot­tom of my cat­e­gories on Socal​nurs​ery​plants​.com. For more infor­ma­tion on each nurs­ery, go to the cat­e­gory for that nursery.

Fever­few can treat migraines

This feels like regift­ing, but in the best of pos­si­ble ways. Every few days I receive a “Heartquote” from Heart­math. The quote I received today ties into the gar­den blog­ging theme of Socal​nurs​ery​plants​.com:

“Live in each sea­son as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign your­self to the influ­ences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink and botan­i­cal med­i­cines.“
Henry David Thoreau
This web­site is so uplift­ing, with a gor­geous new pic­ture of nature with each quote. To sub­scribe go here.

I also wanted to pass on another ter­rific web­site with an Herb Library. The Peo­ples Phar­macy (http//:peoplespharmacy.com/) has a weekly col­umn in the Health sec­tion of the Los Ange­les Times. Authored by Joe and Terry Grae­don, the site also includes a Drug library, Home rem­edy library, Vitamin/​herb Q & A and Phar­macy Q & A, among other sec­tions. In the Herb library you can get some pretty spe­cific infor­ma­tion on how to use fever­few for migraines (chew 2 – 3 fresh leaves daily) and echi­nacea to treat colds, influenza and other res­pi­ra­tory tract infec­tions. As a gar­dener you could grow your own med­i­c­i­nals and know they are organic.