Like a plant coming out of dormancy, the Santa Barbara International Orchid Show has returned after a three-year hiatus. This weekend — Friday March 10, Saturday March 11, and Sunday, March 12 — at the Earl Warren Showgrounds, wander through the thrills of the Orchidaceae...
Orchids are easy to obsess over. Who hasn't been preoccupied with a phalaenopsis at one point? Had some cattleyas floating around the back of your head? Maybe one showed up on your desk and you spent the rest of the workweek helicopter parenting it, or maybe...
Sultry and complicated and scandalously expressive, the orchid has a way of bringing out bee-like behavior in even the most sensible of people. (And on the flip side, making bees act a bit like delusion-prone human beings.) And friends, did we ever swarm swarm swarm...
Last weekend Art Alive happened — and to kick things off, Ryan asked if I would be his date to the plant prom. The party (alright, officially known as Bloom Bash) was thrown last Friday to celebrate San Diego Museum of Art’s annual show; in...
The riotous garden Joe Skoby has created is one that embraces you, absorbs you, tickles you on the ear. Tall philodendrons curve to create organic archways, a snail vine wraps a palm tree in a rich stole of purple flowers, and a creeping fig pokes...
“This place is classic Hawaii,” the guy tells us from across the pool table at Stevenson’s Library at the Grand Hyatt Kauai. He’s a local and has been coming here for years. For Ryan and me, this is only our second trip to the hotel...
We met our neighbor Kimberly’s roses before we met Kimberly herself. They’re bright and big and perfumey, her roses, when they’re in bloom: flashes of apricot and salmon winding around the black fence that lines her yard. “Welcome home!” they’d cheer when we turned the...
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...
Like Zora Neale Hurston said, “Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.” So it seems wonderfully apt that Lora and Frank Banzali — two magnetic Midwesterners who traded Illinois winters for LA’s endless summer — would cultivate their surroundings with...
It's been a while since our last orchid-related post. Today we decided to check back in the sultry, sculptural flowers of the Orchidaceae family because April is National Orchid Month (at least according to the American Orchid Society) and because the wild orchid at the foot...