Over at RB's blog, he fills us in on the latest addition to our family of woods, a mammoth gift from a coworker. It’s not every day you stumble across a piece of desert ironwood (Olneya tesota) of such striking size and complexity. I couldn’t turn down the...
While we were procrastinating on the planting of our spring bulbs, we pawed our way through a stack of internet stories of horticultural (and zoological) import. A few prize pieces from recent days: Siglinda Scarpa is 72 years old and owns 300 cats, many of whom got...
AKA: Water iris Appearance: Tempest in a Dixie cup, the velour coat of arms of the Spears family Origin: The biggest dreamer of all the bog dwellers, this crinkled darling was the first skinny dipper in New Orleans history Occupation: Moistening the lapels of prog rockers along the Gulf Scent:...
We came for the lobster rolls and stayed for the 100-year-old trees. One of our neighborhood favorites, Herringbone in La Jolla, opened splashily last year to crammed happy hours and lively late-night dining inside an arching, blond-beamed former warehouse space. In keeping with the Mediterranean ethos...
We don’t get snow out here, but when our six-foot-tall jade plant — west-facing and located behind our garden pond — is in full flower, it happens to resemble an enormous snowball. We call her “mama jade” because her stem cuttings have been planted in...
Yesterday, we woke up feeling a little bit like compost ourselves, actually: dumpy and sluggish and all heaped together with fermenting material. Composting is one of those things we keep putting off, but for 2013, we're determined to make it happen. We were inspired to do...
Today we celebrated our very first California Christmas. Normally we head to D.C. and New York for the holidays, but, between work demands and travel fatigue, we were content to nest on the West Coast. Feeling nostalgic for her family’s Caribbean traditions, C made a brunch...
The 1948 movie The Red Shoes, restored by Scorsese and offered by Criterion Collection, is a marvel in more ways than we can name. Directed by the Archers, it’s a feat of Technicolor, a loose retelling of a Hans Christian Andersen story in which a dancer comes...
Our aluminum tree aside, we're not into the artificial foliage that emerges every holiday season: that cheap silk ivy, that soulless plastic holly...
This year, don’t just give the gardener in your life the same pair of gloves covered in the same frowzy florals. No doubt he or she already has them. And in, um, spades. For your dear design-minded cultivator, it’s time to think outside the box. For...
