Dwell on Design 2012: Modern fun this weekend

It's time to play: Dwell on Design, the annual expo of furniture, fixtures and finishes for the modern home and garden, is running this weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Staff writer Lisa Boone and producer Dianne de Guzman walked the convention floor on Friday to get some early impressions.

They found Misha Tome sliding down the Cuba playhouse by Play Modern, above. The modular system consists of cubes that can be configured in different ways. Indoor models are made from Baltic birch plywood with a clear finish, and outdoor models are made from marine-grade plywood with a dark finish.

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Above right: Lori Erenberg, left, and Saehee Simmons looked at color samples for Kohler's new sinks in a range of bold hues.

Below right: The BeSpoke Creative console throws some curves, with a sleek white exterior complemented by maple and birch plywood interior.

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.

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.

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.

'Bones': Booth and Brennan's new home, including baby's room

It took six long years, but at the end of the most recent season of "Bones," Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) finally became a couple with a baby on the way. When the show returns Monday night, fans will get their first look at Brennan and Booth's new home -- "a rather grand place, a white elephant which Booth bought and turned into a place Brennan would enjoy," show runner Hart Hanson said.

Deschanel's take on the place: It looks like the love child of a history museum curator and a nostalgic kid-at-heart. "I want it!" the actress said.

At Fox Studios in Los Angeles, production designer Val Wilt and set decorator Megan Malley-Cannon produced a two-story, five-room home that integrates the retro Americana, sports-infused vibe of Booth’s old apartment with the Asian-inspired look of Brennan’s former loft. In other words, Buddha meets baseball.

"The house is what they share together," Wilt said. The result is a traditional home with fireplace, wooden moldings and coffered ceilings accented with a busy array of the couple’s collectibles.

For a tour of the house, including details on that nursery pictured here, keep reading ...

Remembering Jeff Karsner of Huntington children's garden

Jeffrey Karsner, the head gardener of the children's garden at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, was memorialized Saturday as the man whose whimsical installations and educational displays delighted patrons of all ages.

Karsner, who died in an accidental fall at his home in North Hollywood on Jan. 30, had worked at the Huntington since 2006. Colleagues, friends and family were on hand Saturday for the dedication of a park bench with a plaque that reads, "in loving memory of Jeff Karsner for his creativity and energy."

"Jeff brought a special kind of magic to the children’s garden through his imaginative use of plants, and young visitors responded to it joyfully,” said James Folsom, the Huntington's director of the botanical gardens.

Karsner, formerly president of the Los Angeles Cactus and Succulent Society, designed low-water gardens for private clients throughout Los Angeles. His work was featured in the Los Angeles Times Home section in a story about succulent wreaths during the 2006 holiday season.

The inventive gardener was a natural performer and was photographed by The Times wearing a headdress replicating the Huntington's legendarily odoriferous corpse flower in 2009, right. 

Karsner was born in Baltimore in 1961 and worked in children’s television at PBS in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where he was a story editor for Warner Bros. and CBS.

His lifelong passion was puppetry, and his ability to build marionettes from found objects blossomed at the Huntington. One of his characters, Sen the Centennial Senecio, was made of nine varieties of senecio and heralded the 100th anniversary of the Huntington’s desert garden.

The Garbage Maven's goal: A kids' party with no trash

I used to be the sort of mom who strung Mylar balloons with ribbon strings for my son's birthday parties. For each of his eight years, I handed out goody bags stuffed with candy and 99 Cents Only Store toys. I bought cakes topped with plastic decorations. I served junk food and Capri Suns. I was oblivious to the mounds of waste I was generating. I just wanted to throw the perfect party.

This year, I decided on something different. For my son's ninth, trash was the enemy. The goal: a party that generates zero garbage. There would be no Slinkies or wax candy mustaches. And Mylar? That was definitely out.

Throwing a zero-waste party was a challenge. I'm not going to lie. Certain items just weren't possible to eliminate, and the party needed to seem just as fun and “normal” as any of the previous birthday blowouts I've thrown. It's one thing to live environmentally conscious myself. It's another thing to ask parents I didn't know well to be part of the experiment, or to include my son, who splits his time between my house and his dad's, where recycling isn't as big a priority.

Lost L.A.: School gardens, an idea planted a century ago

Good schools make good citizens and responsible citizens plant gardens. Combine the two and you get the school garden movement that's back in Los Angeles a century after it began.

In 1889, officials built one of the city's first public schools, four rooms in a building at the corner of East 7th and Wilson streets downtown. It soon became a two-story, windowed pile crowded with a thousand kids.

At the time, social engineers wrote that an effective education combined classroom learning and outdoor experience. Here in Los Angeles, still a region of fields and orchards, the Board of Education in 1910 hired Marie Aloysius Larkey. Trained in agriculture economy, she brought the school garden movement to Angelenos.

Larkey arranged the purchase of a 100-foot-long square lot at the back of the 7th Street school. Bordered by railroad yards and factories belching fumes from smokestacks, it was a barren, weedy dump. The lot was in a district that reformers called “squalid,” a rundown and littered neighborhood of blue-collar workers renting wood-framed, gardenless houses along treeless, unpaved streets.

Politicians and philanthropists agreed that America's global power depended on educating not just the few whose parents endowed private schools but the many whose moms and dads worked in the factories, banks and department stores. Larkey's open land was ideal for teaching poor children how they could one day transform a yard of their own and contribute to L.A.'s beautification.

New baby monitors stream video, connect via Wi-Fi

The cry has been heard: After 30 years with little change to baby monitoring devices, new designs premiered this month at the Consumer Electronics Show promising Wi-Fi connectivity and high-definition video that streams live to a smartphone.

Some new monitors will have two-way audio, allowing parents to whisper comforting words in their baby’s ear without stepping foot in the room. Other monitors will text messages when a baby starts to cry, and still others will allow parents to shift the camera's view up, down and around the room remotely, using an iPad.

The next generation of technology represents a leap from most of today's monitors, which consist of a radio transmitter equipped with a microphone in the baby’s room, and a receiver in another room, often no more than 1,000 feet away. When the baby stirs, or coos, or cries, mom and dad can hear and decide whether or not to intervene.

Holiday crafts with kids: modern twist on daisy chains

A classic holiday craft got a modern update this week when artist Emily Green hosted a children's daisy chain party at her Los Angeles home. “I always go back to my childhood feelings,” Green said, citing Christmas and Hanukkah parties of her youth, when she and friends made paper chains — some blue and white, some red and green — then mixed them all up and decorated one another's homes.

This time, Green (not to be confused with Home section garden columnist Emily Green) led daughter Daisy and Daisy's friends in making nondenominational chains from unconventional, often recycled materials: tinfoil, doilies, duct tape, oilcloth, vintage fabric, cut-up plastic flowers, party toothpicks, pipe cleaners and scalloped Bordette, the corrugated trim that teachers often use around bulletin boards.

PHOTO GALLERY: Emily Green's crafty home

The artist, who has her own line of housewares and accessories for children, assembled the materials into interlocking strips with a hot glue gun, and the kids added costume jewelry beads and other details. Green, pictured at right, suggested personalizing the chains with family pictures, written wishes or prayers, or kids' art cut into strips.

“Use things that you don't know what to do with,” she said.

During the party, older kids preferred to write wishes and other sentiments, which were attached as little offshoots to the chain links. Other kids preferred using only pipe cleaners. Whatever the style, the project provided not only colorful decoration but also a way for the kids to interact.