When one of our flowerbeds was in urgent need of some sprucing, we acted on a tip from a landscape architect friend and headed east to a wholesale nursery. The place turned out to be a sprawling, plant-hunting goldmine. The only hitch? We had to pretend...
We entered into our air plant relationship with a bunch of misconceptions. They're generally misunderstood; the mythology goes: they're easy (how difficult can they be — they're like the breatharians of the plant world), they're bland, flowerless, overpriced novelties at Home Depot. Alternatively, it's easy...
Our pride and joy is the 60-plus-year-old guava tree outside our kitchen window. It’s a feijoa to be exact, AKA a pineapple guava, and every August and September — in exchange for water, animal action, ferns and a custom RB table at its root —...
“Feed me, Seymour,” the line goes, originally uttered by the neediest plant in history. Little Shop of Horrors gave us (both!) mega nightmares as kids. If only we'd known that someday we would grow to enable our own crop of bloodthirsty carnivores. We brought them home...
During our pilgrimages to Palm Springs, we of course go nuts over the cacti and all the swooping, low-slung architecture and furniture. But tonight we’d like to raise a glass of peyote wine to an unsung deciduous wonder of the desert: the palo verde trees. Springtime...
"The great Victorian-era orchid hunter William Arnold drowned on a collecting expedition on the Orinoco River [...
We appreciate a compelling fish-out-of-water story (Coming to America, Through the Looking-Glass, Splash...
This year, our passion flower vine — at long last — started blooming like nobody's business.
Until the gulf fritillaries moved in.
Our first trip to Palm Springs was a revelation, design-wise, for ourselves and for our house and garden. That was four years ago. Since then we’ve returned annually, usually staying at the Ace, because we love its whole year-round-summer-camp-for-adults vibe. (Down to the hipster water aerobics...