Last chance now: San Marino garden tour

Behind the gates of one St. Albans Road estate in San Marino, past the floss silk tree, the owners have created a backyard “animal garden” for their children, complete with kangaroo paws, lambs ears and lions tails.

Nearby, on Shenandoah Road, the gate opens to a more quintessential California scene: swimming pool, pool house, bath house and outdoor kitchen and fireplace. But it’s the antique garden statue of a woman holding a bouquet of flowers that typically catches visitors' eyes.

Tickets sales close tonight to see these two gardens and three others in a tour Sunday sponsored by the Spiritual Care Guild of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The backyard retreats, all privately owned, are in San Marino neighborhoods close to Lacy Park and the Langham Huntington hotel in Pasadena. 

Sneak peek: New gardens at Natural History Museum's North Campus

Los Angeles is the “birdiest” county in the United States, said Karen Wise, vice president of education and exhibits for the Natural History Museum. One hundred sixty-eight types of birds have been documented in Exposition Park downtown alone, but the museum is hoping to attract even more with its new North Campus gardens. The 3.5 acres are designed to entice critters of all types, so the massive museum that, for 99 years, has documented the history of life on Earth transforms itself into a hands-on outdoor lab.

“We decided the best thing for our visitors was to build a landscape that could serve as a central field site and natural experience in the heart of the city that really allows us and all of L.A. to gather and document the real wildlife that’s living in L.A. today,” said Wise, whose museum houses more than 35 million natural and cultural objects indoors.

Everything in the new garden is designed to foster life. Winding through the space is the Living Wall, right, constructed from spears of stone that were installed vertically and planted with succulents to entice lizards. The 1913 Garden, so named for the year the museum opened, is a mosaic of colored flowers that is sure to delight hummingbirds.

Passion vines and Burmese honeysuckle grow in 12-foot-tall chain link cages that form the garden’s Urban Edge. The plants were selected because they are most effective at attracting butterflies. And a pond at the garden’s center will be populated with Western pond and red-eared slider turtles.

The Global Garden: Yacon, Peruvian sweet root

To some, it's yacon. To others, Peruvian sweet root. "My partner is from Peru," L.A. gardener Derbeh Vance said. “The yacon produces a root that looks like a sweet potato, and is like a jicama or a sweet potato."

Fresh yacon tastes like a cross between a melon and an apple, explaining why yet another common name is Peruvian ground apple. Originating in the Andes, yacon was used as roadside fast food for travelers between Incan cities, according to some historical accounts.

Vance grew one that reached more than 10 feet, sending out leaves that looked like sunflowers, a distant cousin. One day, after the flowers had started to fade, he noticed the ground underneath was swollen. He figured he had gophers.

"So I chopped it down and started digging," Vance said, "and I got 60 pounds from one plant."

Vance works at Project Angel Food and brought part of his unexpected harvest there, asking a chef to use his imagination. "It was so crispy and fresh and sweet that I worried they wouldn't hold up well to cooking," he said. "We had them mashed, toasted and broiled, and it turned out wonderfully. The baked were the best."

The Global Garden: Planting honeybush

 

Derbeh Vance’s honeybush at the Fountain Avenue Community Garden is a landscaper’s dream -- fast growing, tolerant of clay soil and adorned with dramatic serrated leaves and large purplish flower heads, pictured here.

But be careful. This honeybush is Melianthus major, a South African native that is poisonous, safe only for hummingbirds.

“They go absolutely crazy for it,” said Vance, who got his honeybush in a 1-gallon pot at Armstrong Garden Centers.

“The hummingbirds will have wars over it. They come in shifts, get full and go off to sleep. I shook a stalk accidentally and this reddish orange nectar poured out of the flowers.”

Good dining for hummingbirds, less so for humans.

It's an important point because the shrub Cyclopia genistoides, also from South Africa, is called honeybush too -- and its leaves and flowers are used to make caffeine-free tea.

 

Plug mobs: Free seedlings for school gardeners

Mud Baron was trained as a cabinetmaker and learned to economize by finding supplies no one else wanted. When he became a master gardener working to get supplies to school gardens, he figured there had to be a better way than shopping retail.

“Every industry has extra things,” he says. So he started asking growers for the “scratch-and-dent piles.”

Plug Connection in Vista had extras to donate, owner Tim Wada says. In 2006, Baron started what became “plug mobs” — events at which anyone connected with school gardens can show up and get all the seeds and plugs they can use. Community gardeners are welcome once the school gardeners are done.

At Coyote House, every day is an Earth Day

Oh, how far we've come from Earth Days past — when the phrase “green home” conjured images of straw-bale structures, when solar panels seemed like such an earnest novelty, when “LEED certified” hadn't yet crept into public consciousness.

With Earth Day 2012 almost upon us, nearly 60,000 homes in the United States are in the process of being certified in the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Education and Environmental Design program, according to Nate Kredich, the organization's vice president of residential market development. Need more convincing proof of just how far we've come? Take a peek at the new home of architect Ken Radtkey and landscape architect Susan Van Atta.

PHOTO GALLERY: 26-picture tour of Coyote House

INFOGRAPHIC: How the garden roofs, cisterns and other green elements work

The husband and wife's three-bedroom house nestled into a Montecito hillside is dubbed the Coyote House, partly after the name of the couple's street, partly after the howling critters in the area. Beyond its abundance of energy- and water-saving features, however, the house is notable for its utter normality: On the most basic level, it is simply a comfortable and beautiful family home.

“Designing sustainably was a given for us,” says Radtkey, founder of Blackbird Architects, a Santa Barbara firm with an emphasis on sustainable design. “But the most important goal was to make a great home.”

To that end, the house starts with a modern take on the veranda, right. A covered room overlooking the front garden has a sliding screen and front and back sets of glass pocket doors that can open to the outdoors or seal it off in various ways, depending on the season and weather.

A dozen highly flammable eucalyptus trees — by coincidence, cut down just months before the November 2008 Tea fire that swept through the region — were used to build the front door, kitchen table, bookcases, stairs and banister. Other materials used for interior appointments were sustainable too: Cabinets are bamboo, the floors are cork or salvaged stone, most of the walls unpainted plaster.

Mud Baron, an evangelical force in school gardens

It’s not easy to keep pace with the youth gardening evangelist Mud Baron — in the real world or the virtual one. To keep up, you need to relentlessly advocate for schoolyard gardens full of food and flowers. You need be a constant presence on Twitter. (He has more than 24,000 followers.) You need to schlep all over Southern California to collect seeds. And you need to be willing to make people mad, to push teenagers to get dirty and to nudge companies to make donations.

A bearded, baggy-pants wearing Unitarian, Baron might quote Cicero, Lou Reed, Jonathan Swift or Wynton Marsalis to make a point. But he’s also not above poop jokes born of the manure that feeds the gardens.

Essentially unemployed — or at least without a regular paycheck — he hustles at every opportunity. When he leaves a high school garden in Pasadena, he picks a plastic pail full of radishes as a gift for a café. Another day, after working in a garden in San Pedro, he brings a bartender a big bouquet that gets set in an ice bucket by the register.

Baron, rarely without his San Diego Padres cap on his head and his pruning shears in his pocket, is a rabble rousing master gardener with a floral arranger’s touch. Or, as he likes to say, he has tattoos of Martha Stewart and Cornel West on his behind. (We didn’t check, but his girlfriend says that’s not literally true.)

The idea is that no school garden should fail for lack of stuff — so he rustles up seeds, small seedlings called plugs, worm castings, compost, bulbs. Black plastic sheets discarded on a film set become liners for mulch. Last year, he says, he raised $5 million in in-kind donations.

Fenugreek: homegrown greens, backyard spice rack

It’s easy to think of fenugreek as something you're more likely to find in a spice rack than in a garden, but with almost no effort, it's easy to keep in both places. Fenugreek originated in western Asia and southern Europe, where it was used as a medicine, food and forage crop. The seeds were eaten boiled, like lentils, and used as an ingredient in incense. (Seeds were found in King Tut’s burial chamber.)

Nowadays the seeds are used as a flavoring for soups and cheeses, among other things, and delivering a scent that's vaguely similar to maple syrup. In India, the Middle East and parts of East Africa, the leaves are used like spinach and added to sauces and vegetable dishes.

“You have to grow quite a bit,” said Rishi Kumar, who runs the Growing Home urban farm in Diamond Bar. “But the good thing is that it grows very quickly. We trim the tops, and you need a massive amount of it because it cooks down a lot." The most popular dish, Kumar said, is leaves with finely chopped potatoes fried in clarified butter. "That's it. It has such a strong flavor you don't need to add any other spices."

How to get rid of coyotes, skunks, raccoons and more

They wake us up with rowdy snack fests, make a mess of the garden and even have the gall to move in without an invitation. They’re our local wildlife — raccoons, skunks, squirrels, rabbits, coyotes and more.

When a Glendale homeowner discovered a black bear, right, eating Costco meatballs from his garage refrigerator last month, it was another reminder that suburban living still requires coexisting with wildlife. Spring and summer are peak seasons for wild animal families to seek food and shelter.

Experts counsel a three-pronged approach to keep unwanted wildlife at bay. Martine Colette, founder and director of the Wildlife Waystation near Sunland, said the key is vigilance — attention to how your home and garden (and your neighbors’) may be attractive havens for an animal, whether it’s a mouse that can squeeze through a dime-sized hole or a bear that can smell food up to five miles away. Secure those meatballs and follow these three strategies:

What to plant: Five edible picks from Lauri Kranz

Lauri Kranz, who has built a following as an edible gardening consultant in the Hollywood Hills, shares her five favorite picks of the moment: Dragon's tongue beans, Ananas Noire tomatoes, cucumbers, butternut squash and country gentleman corn. Keep reading for why she likes these crops, and where she goes to get seeds and seedlings.