Plants bring us bushels of joy every single day, but around this time of year our thoughts turn to the flora that terrify us. That's right: spooky plants. And we’re not just talking about the sight of our aphid-ravaged milkweed or a fast-moving touch-me-not. In honor of the...
Happy Autumn Equinox! It’s hard to believe that we launched just one equinox ago on the cusp of spring — and that the tulips and kumquats of March have been replaced by the blushing apple trees, pickling tips and dahlias on dahlias on dahlias of...
Updated on September 22, 2013: Last Thursday we, alongside 1,600 other guests, wined, dined and danced at Dîner en Blanc. The secret-until-the-last-moment location turned out to be a verdant arcade within Liberty Station in Point Loma. RB designed and built the vase pictured above and...
It’s been an interesting transition, going from fashion writer to garden blogger. Robust dialects must be swapped (the “bold lip” and “statement pump” of Fashion Week have now been replaced by the “zuke hauls” and “biointensive plant spacing” of #gardenchat) and clothing choices must be...
“Your thighs are appletrees / whose blossoms touch the sky,” William Carlos Williams writes in his 1920 poem “Portrait of a Lady.” The immortal modernist was born on this day in 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey. (“The sand clings to my lips -- / Which...
Paris, 1988. When François Pasquier returned to the city after a stint abroad, he invited a handful of friends to Bois de Boulogne for a picnic. When a handful turned into a horde, guests conspired to dress in head-to-toe white so they could spot each...
Amid all the talk about enjoying the "fruits of your labor" this weekend, we gardeners can say we take that old chestnut literally. Our own plans for Labor Day will include: nibbling on the first signs of guava season, working on a new furniture installation under our citrus...
You already know how we feel about the whole partying-with-plants thing. So when we got an invitation from storied flower shop Adelaide’s to make succulent terrariums (pardon our Latin, but "terraria" just looks strange on the page) after hours, we brushed off our dancing shoes and...
It’s that time of year again! You know, that end-of-summer stretch marked by groaning mailbags, raised eyebrows at the newsstand, and 900+ plus pages of fashion euphoria? That’s right, Vogue magazine’s September issue is out. The famously fat edition is a design-world event not just because of...
“I think the next Space Race is right in our backyard — our urban and suburban spaces need to be rediscovered and re-imagined,” says artist Joe Wirtheim, founder of the modern propaganda project Victory Garden of Tomorrow. He adds, “There can be power in small, ordinary...