The Dry Garden: The art of catching rain, Part 2

When my house was built without gutters in 1950, water that rolled off the roof was caught by graded pavement encircling the foundation. This directed rain away from the garden to paved paths and to the driveway for dispersal to the street and storm drain system. As a style, let’s call it Golden Age of Flood Control.

After watching 33 inches of rain run off the property last year, but then being forced to draw municipal potable water to irrigate the garden, it became a priority to gutter the house so as to capture and not waste future rain. Ultimately some sort of storage will be involved, but as a first measure, the challenge was to get rain from gutter drainage points to garden areas. Done right, the ground would then be well charged when our irrepressible California growing season takes off in February and March.

PART 1: Custom gutters, done just right

The first step was creating a diagram of the roof to see which sections would produce the most runoff, then poring over it with Ruben Ruiz. He is the sheet metal artist who, after installing the gutters, would be fabricating sculptures to push water away from where I didn’t want it, which was near the foundations of the house or street, to where I did want it, which was discharging into thirsty garden soil.

Using the map, it became clear that one of the biggest sections of roof produced so much water that it defied fanciful treatment. Only a conventional downspout and pipe would drain the north roof slope and convey the water behind a fence to where it would be discharged to irrigate fruit trees.

Beyond that, moving water would be done by sculpture. Every gutter would need a new brand of practical art to act as catchers and spreaders. After I asked if the catchers might be flower-shaped, Ruiz disappeared for several weeks into his studio.

The Dry Garden: Custom gutters and the art of catching rain

To harvest rain from your roof for the garden, first you have to catch it. This requires gutters. Gutters are by no means universal appurtenances. Some home styles, such as Craftsman, Spanish and Colonial lend themselves so happily to gutters that they usually come with them. The rolled metal amounts to jewelry around the eaves.

However, put the same gutters on a modern home and you have a problem. The handsomeness of the structure is often defined by the lines of the roof and eaves. Gutters look dumpy; downspouts amount to vandalism.

The upshot? To those of us who live in midcentury homes and want to practice water conservation, the question of whether or not to put up gutters can feel like a choice between looking good or being good.

The realization that a modern house could indeed be artfully guttered came accidentally, during an October visit to a 1952 Smith and Williams home in the San Rafael Hills. The place was mobbed during an estate sale, and I did not get the lamp that I had come for, but walking out I noticed a rain chain hanging from a portico. Above, a flat fascia had been fitted with custom gutters that were so discreet you had to stare hard to determine that they were even there.

The Dry Garden: Storms make case for change around City Hall

As the days of Occupy L.A.’s tenancy around City Hall Park became numbered last month, I wrote in The Times' Op-Ed pages that the city should seize the opportunity to replace the trashed lawn with a model garden demonstrating state-of-the-art storm-water capture and drought-tolerant planting. The Mar Vista Community Council immediately began a campaign to support it. The Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, California Native Plant Society and Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants each wrote the Department of Recreation and Parks calling for the city to seize the opportunity. But the most forceful argument came in the one-two punch of the Nov. 30 windstorm followed by this week’s rain.

When hurricane-force winds tore through the Los Angeles foothills, few residents had the kind of green bin capacity needed to cope with the sheer quantity of leaves and wood that landed in their yards. In a brief moment of magical thinking, some local governments asked homeowners to haul the detritus to special drop-off points. “With the truck I don't have?” was one of the many responses on Facebook and various Patch sites.

Ignoring instructions, residents simply dumped huge quantities of leaves, branches, palm fronds and trees at the curb. Many cities had no choice but to send out crews, including some from prisons, to begin clearing curbsides. They worked with stunning speed but, by last Monday, rain was closing in. Even bionic chain gangs could not have coped with the sheer mass of downed leaves and wood lining the streets served by L.A. County’s massive storm-drain system. Flooding of streets would be an inevitable byproduct for some neighborhoods.

The Dry Garden: Ornamental grasses, poetry in motion

There is nothing lovelier than tall ornamental grasses, backlit and waving in a breeze. Even vacant lots can produce stands of car-crash-inducing beauty. So when gardeners hope to capture some of that lyrical action for their own homes, it’s logical to assume that all one need do is stop mowing the lawn. Alas, that would be wrong. Harnessing the tousled romance of ornamental grasses (and plants that look like these grasses) is so hard that even experienced horticulturists factor generous time and space for trial and error into their approaches before they have, in effect, allowed the right plant to do its stuff in the right place.

Among the challenges are discovering these meadow grasses' growing seasons, understanding which ones are invasive, watering them enough but not too much, deducing where they are happiest, out-competing unwanted turf grasses and remnants of lawn and, hardest of all, mastering scale. If you haven’t put a tall grass where a short one would be better, or big one where a small one should have gone, you haven’t been bitten by the meadow bug.

Grasses and their doppelganger cousins -- rushes and sedges -- come in so many shapes, sizes and habits that they can serve as filler, accent or focal point in a garden. These ultimate functions are rarely clear when they are enigmatic little clumps sitting in flats or 1 gallon pots on nursery shelves. Repeating the mnemonic “sedges have edges, rushes are round, grasses are hollow right up from the ground” will help take the edge off as you admit helplessness and look for a knowledgeable store clerk.

Given that knowledgeable staff in garden centers are almost as rare as hens teeth, the best place to go for help is the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants in Sun Valley, above right. Signage around an impressive and growing selection of grasses alerts shoppers to what might be Lesson No. 1 in landscaping with grasses: These plants divide into two distinct classes of cool and warm season growers. So if you want growth and color in fall, winter and early spring, go for cool season. If you want it in summer, choose warm season. Payne also has helpfully divided the grasses and sedges into separate areas for plants favoring wetter or drier conditions.

Christmas tree made of books at Inglewood library

When a reader wrote to recommend a Christmas tree that “requires absolutely no water and can be broken down and re-used,” I expected the usual fake type involving metal brackets and plastic leaves. But on opening the attachment from a friend of Inglewood Public Library, I discovered the tree in the photograph was clearly made of pulp, which is to say books.

It is the creation of assistant librarian Bri Webber, pictured at right. It has been a hard two years at the Inglewood Public Library, Webber said, and the place had no budget for holiday decorations. So she went online and saw that the library trend of 2011 is to build trees from books. There’s a gorgeous one at Gleeson Library in San Francisco. Even the nearby Loyola Marymount University library had one, she said. “I thought, ‘If LMU can do it, we can do it.’”

Moreover, Webber swiftly recognized which books were being used in most of the examples. They were the suitably green-bound National Union Catalog, volumes listing books recorded by the Library of Congress. "I thought, 'I know exactly what those books are and nobody uses them and they’re dusty and this way they’ll be used.' "

After finding different years and different volumes, she used red books for the skirt. By the end, she lost count of how many catalogs she stacked up on the ground floor near the elevator. “It’s in the high 300s,” she said, laughing that once she lost track, they couldn’t have a contest to guess how many books were in the tree.

Given that cuts have reduced what had been a staff of about 70 to something like 30, Webber said, it's a wonder that she found the spirit to do the tree at all. “Times are rough,” she said. “We’re trying to come up with creative ways to keep us happy and keep people happy.”

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-- Emily Green

Photo: Inglewood Public Library

The Dry Garden: Now that the high winds have departed...

After the storm, we have no coroners, no priests for big trees. There will no autopsies, no last rites for the shredded jacaranda and more than 50 damaged trees at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Arcadia, the fallen oaks of Fair Oaks Avenue or mangled magnolia trees of Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. Ceremony, if it can be called that, will involve gas-fired buzz saws and insurance adjusters.

So how do we mark what happened? For that matter, what did happen? And what, ultimately, will we make of the night the trees fell?

After the transformers began exploding about 9 p.m. Wednesday, casting what at first looked like dry lightning, the storm was largely heard but not seen. This was wind that didn’t so much howl as rumble, subside, then return madder, like a drunk not quite finished busting up a bar. One woman I heard on the news kept saying, “It sounded like a train.” It did. A drunk train out for an accident.

To Midwesterners familiar with tornadoes, or Gulf Coasters for whom hurricanes are so common they have a season, downed trees and flying deck chairs are nothing new. We call this a disaster? They have a point. The Facebook account of a friend noted that her brother missed being crushed by two eucalyptuses that fell on her guest house only because he got up to go to the bathroom. That's typical of the near-miss stories circulating.

Which brings us to the bottom line. There were mass casualties of trees. My friend’s brother lived. The eucalyptuses didn’t. We lived, and our urban canopy took the beating for us. My next door neighbor to the south lost three trees. His worker was out at dawn cutting up the trunk of what was a 75-foot-tall liquidambar. Asked if he was all right, he looked up blearily and said, “I’m from Georgia. This doesn’t happen in Georgia.”

Windstorm: How to prevent toppled trees, dispose of palm fronds

Bad night to be a tree in Southern California. Toppled eucalyptus and wind-whipped palm fronds have turned streets into obstacle courses. As we brace for more high winds Thursday and Friday, it's worth revisiting the Dry Garden column by Emily Green last year about how to prevent trees from falling in your yard. Writes Green: "When trees do blow over, often it's because of circularized roots, the chopping of roots and, most often, the over-watering of roots." Preventing your statuesque shade plant from becoming mere lumber is a task that starts in the nursery or garden center, writes Green, who walks through us through the process.

It's also worth noting that we need to think twice before putting any of those fallen palm fronds into the green waste bin. That may seem like the eco thing to do, but as noted in our "Can I Recycle ...?" series, some cities do not want palm fronds in their green bins. Palm heads are particularly problematic, as municipal mulching equipment can't grind seeds adequately to prevent them from germinating in the compost. More details and advice are in the recycling palm fronds post and our Can I Recycle...? gallery.

-- Craig Nakano

Photo, top: A fallen tree blocks Mulholland Drive west of the 405 Freeway on Wednesday night. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times.

Photo, bottom: Palm fronds in the Los Feliz neighborhood of L.A. on Thursday morning. Credit: Associated Press.

 

The Dry Garden: Holiday tidings, trimmed in recycled wood

My hand aches. My back aches. There is no end of aching in sight. But as Thanksgiving approaches, gratitude runs deep. I am thankful for a remarkably generous rain year, for California poppies, for sunflowers, local horse-stable manure so good that the guy who composts it calls it “craptonite,” for the bare-root plum tree that turned out to be a quince, for lemon-soaked quince wedges in stir fries, for the inventor of ibuprofen. This year, above all, I’m thankful for the things that I used to throw away.

The green bin system that picks up garden trimmings, processes them and then gives away finished compost is a wonder of efficiency. A California model developed to divert lawn clippings from landfill is now used across the country. Yet the very people who run it would be the first to agree that in the long arc that is learning how to garden, the ultimate goal is recycling without trucks. 

In a modern, urban context, this goal starts with keeping less lawn and composting the clippings you do have. Municipal haulers would love us to keep back fall leaves too.

My latest discipline has been to reuse small wood from pruning jobs. It’s been harder than expected. Dealing with sharp sticks is an order of magnitude more difficult than composting the soft stuff. Woody stalks, branches and vines do not break down anywhere near as readily as leaves or grass in compost. Carelessly tossed in a compost bin, they can turn the pile into a mixing bowl full of daggers. But their applications are so numerous and so useful, this year all I want from Santa is a sharpener for my hand pruners.

The Dry Garden: Tips for the best persimmon tree

One of the first things that I wanted to do in my new garden last year was to cut down the persimmon tree at the center of the large backyard. As early rains stripped the last of the leaves from its limbs and crows pecked at a few fruit, it looked less like a tree and more like an accident scene. Had the person who pruned its tangle of stumped and crossed limbs been a maniac? A gaping crack where the main branches met the trunk looked like it had been smote from heaven.

Only catching sight of its last fall leaves at twilight stopped me. A year later, restoring that wounded tree has become one of my passions. After scant fruit last year, this fall the tree -- perhaps 10 feet tall and 12 feet wide -- has produced so much fruit that I’ve called in friends and told them to bring crates. Tending it has amounted to an education. Before talking about why, a couple of nods are in order to two must-read treatments on persimmons. The first is a fact sheet from the California Rare Fruit Growers. The second is a survey of the different persimmons grown commercially around California by Times contributor David Karp.

The fruit growers and Karp do a wonderful job explaining the differences between two distinct types of persimmons -- astringent and non-astringent -- including variations in size and flavor. This column seeks chiefly to explain how to care for the more popular of the two, the kind I inherited, the non-astringent Fuyu.

The Dry Garden: Détente with the gopher

Plant ecologist Paula Schiffman came to praise gophers when she packed a lecture last spring hosted by the Los Angeles chapter of the California Native Plant Society. It was awkward for the Cal State Northridge professor, given that most of the audience filling a cold, no-frills Santa Monica meeting room had come to learn how to kill the animals.

The atmosphere only got colder as Schiffman’s live-and-let-live message began to sink in: Gophers were here before us, they are integral to our local ecology, and one of the most common ways that we kill them also can accidentally poison a whole host of other animals.

Anyone who gardens with gophers can imagine the crowd's aloof response. But even as fall planting season is in full swing, and we find seedlings and young plants either dug up and dragged under, it merits hearing Schiffman out.